At the International Standards Summit 2019 in Düsseldorf a group of people representing owners, engineering and construction firms, vendors and services providers in the AEC space, and standards organization Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and buildingSMART International (bSI) were invited to meet to discuss ways to move forward in promoting a standards-based approach to geospatial + BIM interoperability.
The BIM and geospatial interoperability challenge is the latest symptom of the broader problem of integrating AEC and geospatial workflows, that has contributed to low productivity in the construction sector. One of the areas of broad agreement at the meetup was that developing a standards-based approach to the BIM+geospatial interoperability problem is urgent. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that there is growing evidence of the significant business benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction. Design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM), build-operate-transfer (BOT), and public-private-partnerships (PPP) are among the projects that have reported positive benefits of an integrated approach.
The second reason for urgency is that without standards proprietary interoperability will become the de facto standard. In November 2017 the BIM and geospatial market-leaders Autodesk and ESRI announced an agreement to address the interoperability problem. Since then both ESRI and Auto desk have been busy implementing proprietary ways to bring each other's data into their software environment.
ArcGIS is ESRI's market-leading GIS product. Revit is Autodesk's market-leading BIM application that is utilized by designers for vertical BIM (buildings), although there are landscape architects that have managed to use it as well. Revit models include spatial data and related non-spatial information. With the release of ArcGIS Pro 2.2 in June 2018 direct reading of Revit BIM (.RVT) files is now supported. In the past Revit models had to be imported through conversion to IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) files and then go through a second conversion to an ESRI geodatabase. ArcGIS Pro 2.2 makes it possible to open a Revit BIM model directly. Tools are provided for correctly georeferencing BIM models in ArcGIS. Revit data added to ArcGIS behaves like any other 3D GIS data and can be queried, measured and analyzed.
InfraWorks is Autodesk's application that allows civil engineers to design roads and highways in context. InfraWorks 19.2, released in September 2018, now supports the Autodesk Connector for ArcGIS. Designers and engineers can bring GIS content from ArcGIS Online into InfraWorks allowing content such as roads, pipelines, and electrical transformers to be directly imported. The link is dynamic making it possible to build an InfraWorks model directly from GIS data published into ArcGIS Online. When the GIS data is updated, the InfraWorks model can be updated and refreshed. With the release of Autodesk Civil 3D 2019 InfraWorks models can be brought into Civil 3D, Autodesk's civil design product. Together these enhancements enable workflows from ArcGIS through InfraWorks to Civil 3D.
Together these implementations represent a proprietary (but incomplete) solution to the BIM+geospatial interoperability challenge. If you happen to use Tekla, Bentley BIM, Vectorworks or Graphisoft as your BIM software or QGIS, GeoServer/MapServer/PostGIS, GeoMedia, MapInfo, Manifold, or Smallworld as your GIS software, this does not begin to solve your problem. The objective of the OGC/buildingSMART partnership is to provide a standards-bases solution to the interoperability problem. The Integrated Digital Built Environment Subcommittee (IDBE SC) was founded to increase interoperability between the geospatial and built environment domains, specifically through coordination of standards development activities of the OGC and buildingSMART International (bSI).
At the meetup in Düsseldorf IDBE was represented by Hans-Christoph Gruler of Leica Geosystems, Leif Granholm of Trimble and Jim Plume of bSI Australasia. Also present were representatives of Bentley Systems, NavVis, Solibri(Nemetschek), Schiphol Airport, Hong Kong Housing Authority, Royal Haikoning, CRB, think project!, and others. Together these folks represent owners, the construction sector, and vendors.
A second conclusion of the meetup is that the IDBE SC needs more involvement from all sectors of the construction industry, but especially broader representation from vendors and owners. To date most of the efforts that I am aware of involve attempting to map the OGC standard CityGML to bSI's IFC standard. It is fair to say that the research to date has shown that this is not possible in general. Leif Granholm has championed another approach to the problem that moves interoperability up the stack from data models to the software level. To be successful this requires participation from the major vendors in the geospatial and BIM spaces. Owners, especially government, can encourage a standards-based as opposed to a proprietary approach to interoperability by mandating or requiring standards in RFIs, RFPs and contracts.
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