Between the Poles: FOSS4G Frank Warmerdam on Vertical Datums

Geoff Zeiss

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Open Source Geospatial Foundation OSGEO
OSGeo was created to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software and promote its widespread use
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Sharing information about the location of underground utilities
The U.S. devotes an estimated $10 billion annually to locating underground infrastructure. Every construction project requiring excavation involves significant efforts in locating underground utilities prior to and during construction to reduce the risk of injuries and unexpected project delays. But this information is rarely shared and the location of underground infrastructure is recaptured over and over again. There are successful examples around the world where municipal and regional governments have helped enable a shared underground utility network database.
Growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction
Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years. A growing number of countries are mandating BIM for public projects. While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture. Similarly there has been only anecdotal support for an integrated BIM and geospatial approach for design, build, operate and maintain projects. Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.
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BIM + geospatial interoperability would avoid another CAD + GIS quagmire
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BVLOS drones improve power line inspections amid increasing fire and storm risks for utilities | Utility Dive
Transmission line inspections for vegetation management and other purposes are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. We saw the devastating effect of vegetation encroachment in the recent California fires, which in part have been blamed on failure to maintain properly cleared transmission lines. With drones that can cover great distances in a single flight and provide detailed and accurate aerial imagery of transmission lines and other infrastructure, it is now possible to almost completely automate this expensive process. Automating transmission line inspections for vegetation management using BVLOS drones not only saves money, but also could improve the resiliency and reliability of the transmission grid.

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September 07, 2010

FOSS4G Frank Warmerdam on Vertical Datums

There is a lot more interest in three dimensional surfaces these days and this is also reflected in the open source geospatial world. This afternoon at FOSS4G in Barcelona, Frank Warmerdam gave a talk on the subject of Vertical Datums: Introduction and Software Review to a standing room only audience.

He summarized the different models for elevation measurement including the traditional elipsoidal, tidal and orthometric. (The image shows the divergence between the geoid (EGM 96) and elipsoidal (WGS 84) models for representing the Earth.) He described some of the challenges in working with vertical coordinate systems, such as the difficulty in relating EPSG to OGC vertical coordinate systems.

The good news for the open source geospatial community is that Frank is working on extending several open source libraries to support vertical datums including

    * Liblas
    * Libgeotiff
    * GDAL
    * PROJ.4

He mentioned that CS-MAP already supports vertical datums and in particular provides extensive transformation grid files (gtx) for transforming between different models. Proj.4 and CS-MAP are both part of the OSGeo MetaCRS project that Frank chairs.

Posted at 03:01 PM in Digital elevation models, Geospatial Open Source, Open Source Geospatial | Permalink

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Between the Poles

Geoff Zeiss

July 2023

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September 07, 2010

FOSS4G Frank Warmerdam on Vertical Datums

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