Between the Poles

Urban planning working group announced by the Open Geospatial Consortium

An Urban Planning Domain Working Group (DWG) has been chartered to define the role for Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards within the urban planning discipline.  The DWG offers an open forum for the discussion and presentation of interoperability requirements, use cases, and implementations of OGC standards relevant to urban planning. 

Technologies and trends such as smart cities, smart grids, sensor webs, the Internet of Things (IoT), facilities and asset management, indoor and outdoor navigation, energy performance modeling and real-time, “big data” analytics are important for urban planners.  In these technology domains, open standards encourage the sharing of information. The OGC Urban Planning Domain Working Group intends to discover requirements for open spatial standards in information systems involved in the planning, design, use, maintenance and governance of publicly accessible spaces. Requirements identified by OGC Domain Working Groups are typically used as the basis for standards development by chartered OGC Standards Working Groups (SWGs).

Image: Sunshine Ecomap

Open standards-based foundation for integrating BIM, geospatial and smart meters for urban energy performance optimization

The European Union has set itself aggressive goals to reduce GHG emissions by 20%, increase renewables share of energy generation to 20%, and to reduce energy consumption by 20% by 2020.  The EU seems to be on track for the first two goals, but the third remains a challenge.  In 2020, the European consumption of energy is projected to be 25 trillion kWh.  By 2040 it is expected to rise to 28 trillion kWh.  In terms of primary energy consumption, buildings represent around 40%.  In 2009, residential buildings consumed 68% of the total final energy use in buildings.  Energy in households is mainly consumed by heating (70%), cooling, hot water, cooking and appliances. Gas is the most common fuel used in buildings.

 

I have blogged about the European SUNSHINE project before.  The SUNSHINE (Smart Urban Services for Higher Energy Efficiency) project is focused on energy efficiency for buildings in an urban environment.  It is a European Commission (EC) funded project that started about a year ago and is intended to continue for 36 months.

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Energy certification of buildings is a key policy instrument for reducing the energy consumption and improving the energy performance of new and existing buildings. It is expected to help increase demand for high performance buildings by improving the energy performance of the building stock in urban centers. SUNSHINE is intended as a step towards toward such a policy and a way to  contribute to improving the energy efficiency of buildings.  SUNSHINE is intended to be accessible to Web and mobile platforms. An interesting aspect of the project is is the development of an extended CityGML model for representing urban structures for energy performance modeling.

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Three use cases are being considered.

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1 Assessment of energy performance

The goal is to supports the automatic large-scale assessment of building energy performance based on publicly available data. The building energy performance models will be used for energy.density mapping ("ECOMaps") .  It is intended that an ADE extension to CityGML for 3D building energy modeling will be developed.

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2 Heating and cooling forecast and alerts

This focuses on existing buildings that have been selected for energy performance improvement.  It relies on localized weather forecasts and other information to forecast heating/cooling requirements to optimize energy performance..

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3 Optimization of power consumption by public lighting

The idea is to control illumination so that areas are only illuminated when people are present and the level of natural lighting requires it.

 

SUNSHINE is based on customizing and integrating other EC-funded smart city applications including

• Smart urban services based on open standards to support energy efficiency of buildings
• Open data hub for data distribution
• eEnvironmental services for advanced applications within INSPIRE
• 3D CityGML models for solar energy potential assessment and noise mapping & simulation

SUNSHINE will be piloted at nine sites across five countries that include 20 public buildings in Ferrara, 60 technical buildings in Trentino, and public illumination systems in several Italian cities.

 

At Geospatial World Forum 2014 in Geneva this year as part of the GeoEnergy track, Piergiorgio Cipriano, GI/SDI Project Manager at Sinergis, Italy discussed integrating energy usage data from smart meters with city models using the CityGML standard with the goal of improving the energy performance of buildings on an urban scale.

Location is essential for linking information from different providers and sources.  The “ecomap” represents the “energy need” at building level.  For this simple map, it is necessary to integrate at the very least the following data in order to predict building energy performance with sufficient precision:

• Building footprints
• Building height (or number of floors)
• Building use(s)
• Building age and corresponding building envelope stereotypes
• Stereotypes for heating/hot-water/ventilation systems

Building modeling for urban energy performance modeling

The fundamental concept is to exploit existing standards as much as possible to avoid reinventing the wheel.  Two relevant standards for the energy performance analysis of buildings are the INSPIRE data specification for the spatial data theme Buildings (INSPIRE-BU) and  Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) CityGML with an Application Domain Extension (ADE) for the Energy Performance of Buildings (EPB).

Convergence of BIM and CityGML

CityGML has strongly influenced the development of the INSPIRE BU model, both for 2D and for 3D profiles.  The concept of a base model defining semantic objects, attributes and relations which are required by most applications has been adopted by INSPIRE BU (as core profiles).  The concept of External Reference to link to more domain-specific information systems or to ensure consistency between 2D and 3D representations of buildings has also been reused in INSPIRE BU.  The design pattern of Building – BuildingPart aggregation is also included in the INSPIRE applications schemas. Many attributes (e.g. RoofType, YearOfConstruction) have been included in INSPIRE BU profiles.
 
Many use cases that were considered for INSPIRE BU require a three-dimensional representation of buildings such as a building information model (BIM). Examples are noise emission simulation and mapping, solar radiation computation or the design of an infrastructure project. To allow for that, the building representation in Level of Detail (LoD1 - LoD4) of CityGML has been added to the INSPIRE BU model as a core 3D profile.  The whole content of LoD1 - LoD4 including  features attached to buildings such as boundaries, openings, rooms are the base of the extended 3D profile.

For large scale energy performance at the urban level,  detailed interior elements of each building are not required.  It is possible to work at a simple Level of Detail 3 (LOD3) and include elements like roofs, envelope walls, and windows.  This can also be used to make a comparison with other data sources such as aerial thermal images.

Energy usage data exchange

Green Button implements the common-sense idea that electricity customers should be able to securely download their own easy-to-understand energy usage captured by their smart meter.  Not only does it provide the retail customer with access to their usage data , it also provides the ability to authorize a third party service provider to access his or her energy usage data directly.  This architecture presents a consistent mechanism for authorized exchange of energy usage information.

To integrate electric power usage information from smart meters into SUNSHINE, the GreenButton specification defined by the NAESD (North American Energy Standards Board) was identified as the preferred implementation option for the meter data exchange protocol to be used in Sunshine.  IEC 61968-9 was judged to be much more complicated and less supported in terms of practical examples and software tools.

Open, standards-based foundation for urban energy performance analysis

Together INSPIRE BU, CityGML with the energy performance ADE, and the Green Button specification for energy usage data provide an open, standards-based foundation for energy performance analysis for urban environments.

Standards for the convergence of BIM, 3D and geospatial

At Geospatial World Forum 2014 in Geneva this year Leif Granhom, Senior Vice President at Tekla Finland gave an insightful presentation about the integration of building information modeling (BIM) and geospatial information.  An important part of his presentation summarized the efforts currently underway to develop standards for integrating BIM and geospatial information.

What is BIM ?

Leif Granholm has been involved with BIM and geospatial from the beginning, joining a startup software company named Tekla Oy In 1979.  He has spent 30 years at Tekla doing everything from programming to sales to BIM ambassador.  Construction and BIM became the focus of his work a little over 10 years ago. Prior to that, geographic information systems was his focus, so he is familiar with both BIM and geospatial.

Leif first asked the perennial question what is BIM, is it software, process, technology or what ?  In his view there is no practical consensus on what BIM is - everyone to speaks about BIM feels impelled to include a section on what is BIM.  Probably the most common perception of people in the industry is that BIM is software.  Others descriibe it as a process, model, or a populated database describing a facility.  Leif's favourite is that BIM is a Technology.

BIM includes graphics, because appearance is important.  BIM incorporates building objects containing geometry and properties in the form of structured information.  There are different types of objects describing buildings including functional (doors and windows), physical (beams), logical (90 degree angles), and abstract objects (rooms).  BIM also includes objects describing process including schedules, resources,  costs, quality assurance, tasks, work, approvals, RFI's and submittals.  Perhaps the simplest way to summarize BIM is that it is about sharing.  BIM is open, structured, semantic, and standard information.

BIM + geospatial

But other semantic information is also required and this is where the geospatial dimension comes in.  Examples are terrain models, cadastral (parcel) information, zoning information and utilities.

The geospatial community is becoming increasingly aware of 3D technology. It is used for 3D cadasters, digital terrain models, architectural and engineering design and modeling entire cities in 3D.  To support this trend new standards are being developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) such as CityGML and IndoorGML, InfraGML, KML and 3D services in collaboration with web3D (webGL, X3D).  And at the last OGC Technical Committee meeting, the Charter Meeting for a new Urban Planning Domain Working Group (DWG) was held.

BIM-Geospatial integration is a very hot topic. Several standardization initiatives are ongoing including ISO BIM-GIS Ad Hoc Group, the OGC-building SMART alliance partnership, the InfraBIM project to extend Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) for infrastructure (roads, railways, bridges, tunnels, and dams).  There is a joint project to develop conceptual schema of alignments of InfraGML and IFC.  There is also an initiative to generate CityGML and IndoorGML from IFC. The V-Con project is designed to enable Dutch and Swedish traffic authorities to use BIM for the whole life cycle of roads and railways.

Comprehensive open city model for Bahrain includes underground infrastructure

Locating underground infrastructure in Bahrain

Bahrain is one of the few places in the world which attempts to maintain the location of all underground infrastructure in a single database.  As I blogged in 2009, the location of all underground infrastructure in Bahrain is stored in a single Oracle Spatial RDBMS.  This database Intelligent Decision Support System (iDSS), which is supported by  the Ministry of Works, includes all utility networks

• electricity including transmission, distribution, and street lighting
• water including transmission and distribution
• wastewater including storm, road, sanitary, and combined
• telecommunications

The source databases are maintained by the respective owners, water and electricity by the Water and Electricity Authority, telecommunications by Batelco, and wastewater by the Ministry of Works.  iDSS has several layers of security that determine who can see what, and who can update what.

Anyone proposing to add to or make a change to underground infrastructure is required to complete a Proposal Request, essentially a building permit.  The request is forwarded electronically to all of the participating utilities, who are required to review and respond to the request within three days.

Developing a national 3D data model

At the GEO Business 2014 conference in London, Debbie Wilson, Senior Information Architect at the Ordnance Survey in the UK, presented an overview of the development of a comprehensive national 3D city model for Bahrain that she designed in less than six months under the sponsorship of the Survey and Land Registration Bureau of the Kingdom of Bahrain (SLRB). The goal is to develop a national 3D data model that supports a broad range of objectives including topographic mapping, land administration, hydrographic survey, utilities, infrastructure, local governance and spatial planning, agriculture, aquaculture, and environment.  Currently it does not include the inside of buildings or other structures. 

Specifically the national 3D data model is intended to support SLRB strategic initiatives

• 3D data capture
• As-built survey
• Underground utilities
• Sand search

It is intended to promote better government data sharing as a key underpinning for economic development.  This is a public-private partner (PPP) initiative involving municipalities, the Ministry of Works, and utilities.

Debbie's approach was to use existing standards (ISO, OGC, INSPIRE, industry-specific) as much as possible and to extend them only as required to meet the objectives of the SLRB. The basic model is CityGML with the CityGML utility extension ( Application Domain Extensions or ADE) for underground utilities.  In addition Debbie designed a specific ADE for Bahrain's national model called the Bahrain CityGML ADE which added floors and sub-units for high-rise buildings and some other elements for land administration. The 3D model she developed ultimately included 236 feature classes and supports Level of Detail (LoD) 3. 

Currently it does not support building information models (BIM), but the SLRB is interested in extending the model to support BIM in the future.

Implementation

A prototype implementation of the Bahrain National Data Model was developed on Oracle Spatial.  Data was imported from a variety of sources including the Ministry of Public Works, municipalities and utilities.  The data model and interface to the database are intended to be vendor neutral.  Demonstration applications using the data base were developed using ESRI ArcScene and CityEngine, Bentley Map and Google Maps.

Debbie credits open standards as a key factor in enabling this comprehensive national data model to be developed so rapidly, in under six months.  Furthermore the implementation only required two months.  The advantages that Debbie found from using open standards include

• Consistent framework enabling different domains to come together to develop a harmonized data model
• Provides a long-term foundation for data maintenance and exchange
• Platform independent allowing implementation using wide range of technologies
• Comprehensive 3D National Data Model developed in 6 months
• Prototyping team implemented model for all 236 features in Oracle database and migrated data within 2 months
• SLRB team developed series of demonstrations using key stakeholder applications withi 3 days
• SLRB and stakeholders can now start harnessing the power of their data to deliver new innovative services

Open national data model including utilities

This is an important step in developing a comprehensive data model and especially an open data model for underground utilities that I hope the smart cities community adopts and builds on.  I would recommend that any organization, municipal, regional, or national that is developing or intends to develop a national data model for modeling national infrastructure take a serious look at this open model and to consider using it as a reference for their own model.

Automated code-checking: Review of 28 national, state, city and third-party BIM standards and guidelines

Checking regulatory compliance for building permitting remains a tedious, time-consuming and costly process. While the critical importance of timely, accurate, and uniform code review has been an important goal of regulatory agencies for some time (for over a decade in the case of Singapore), only recently has the industry started to experience a paradigm shift.

Fiatech is planning to permanently transform the way construction project code reviews are conducted. The AutoCodes Project aims to make the building regulatory process  faster, more uniform, and more competitive through automated code-check technology based on virtual 3D construction models or BIMs (Building Information Models).  The AutoCodes Project guideline aims at creating a consistent and reliable modeling methodology to streamline processes and result in faster, more accurate code checking.

One of the activities of the AutoCodes project was to commission a review of existing, publicly available Building Information Modeling (BIM) standards and guidelines including those that are in development and completed.  The research goal is to establish a foundation for developing modeling requirements and methodologies for automated code checking.

The research team reviewed 28 BIM standards and guidelines (see listing below), including eight that were developed by third-party organizations, for example, the National BIM Standard developed by the buildingSMART alliance, and 20 by owner organizations, for example, the General Services Administration’s (GSA) BIM Guide Series. Eight out of the 28 documents are considered standards and 20 are considered guidelines.

None of the standards and guidelines reviewed define detailed requirements for automated code checking.  However, 15 recommend automated code checking/validation as a potential BIM use.  For example, the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) of Singapore launched CORENET (Construction and Real Estate NETwork) e-submission for the building and construction industry in 2001. BCA began accepting BIM e-submission (architectural, structural & MEP) in 2011.

Building permitting in Singapore

Singapore is an interesting example because its stated goal is to make its permitting process faster than anywhere else in the world.  As a result, in many ways Singapore is leading the world in making the building permitting process more efficient.

The Building and Construction Authority (BCA) led a multi-agency effort in 2008 to implement the world’s first BIM electronic submission (e-submission).  The BIM e-submission system streamlines the process for regulatory submission.  The process of moving to electronic submissions took about four years to complete.

In 2010 the BCA implemented the BIM Roadmap with the aim that 80% of the construction industry will use BIM by 2015. This is part of the government’s plan to improve the construction industry’s productivity by up to 25% over the next decade.

Digital signatures are legal in Singapore.  In many jurisdictions around the world, engineering and architectural drawings submitted to a municipal government require a signature or signatures of a licensed professional engineer (P.E.), in ink on a piece of paper.

Digital submissions are mandatory in Singapore.  Initially Singapore's e-submission system meant that making a submission for a building permit required submitting 2D DWG, DGN, DXF, DWF, or PDF files.

The BCA is responsible for building permits in Singapore.  When a submission is received, it is reviewed by 16 government agencies, but BCA has the final authority to grant or reject the submission or ask for clarifications or modification.  Initially e-submission required 2D drawings with layers defined according to a BCA standard. 

But Singapore is moving rapidly toward building information models (BIM).  Project teams only need to submit one building model, which contains all of the information needed to meet the requirements of a regulatory agency.  In 2010, nine regulatory agencies accepted architectural BIM 3D models for approval through e-submission. This was followed by the acceptance of mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) and structural BIM models in 2011. To date, more than 200 projects have made BIM e-submissions.

BIM standards and guidelines reviewed

Third-Party Organizations in the United States National BIM Standard - United StatesTM US May, 2012 buildingSMART alliance (bSa) Standard E202 – 2008 BIM Protocol Exhibit US Sep, 2008 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Guideline The Contractor’s Guide to BIM (Edition 1) US Sep, 2006 Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) Guideline Third-Party Organizations in other Countries NATSPEC National BIM Guide AUSTRALIA Sep, 2011 NATSPEC Guideline AEC (UK) BIM Protocols UK Sep, 2012 AEC (UK) Guideline Common BIM Requirement 2012 (COBIM) FINLAND Mar, 2012 buildingSMART Finland Standard BoligBIM (BIM Manual) NORWAY Nov, 2011 Boligprodusentene (Norwegian Home Builders Association) Guideline BIM Project Specification CHINA Jun, 2011 Hong Kong Institute of Building Information Modeling Guideline

 

Federal Governments The USACE BIM Road Map (ERDC TR-06-10) US Oct,2006 USACE Guideline Minimum Modeling Matrix (M3) US Sep, 2013 USACE Standard GSA BIM Guide US 2006-2012 GSA Guideline The VA BIM Guide US Apr, 2010 VA Guideline “ATTACHMENT F” -- BUILDING INFORMATION MODELING (BIM) REQUIREMENTS US Apr, 2011 AFCEE Standard Singapore BIM Guide SGP May, 2012 BCA Guideline CORENET BIM e-submission Guidelines SGP Jan, 2010 BCA Guideline

 

State/Local Governments State of Ohio Building Information Modeling Protocol US Oct, 2012 State of Ohio Guideline Texas Facilities Commission Professional Architectural/Engineering Guidelines US Apr, 2012 State of Texas Guideline GSFIC BIM Guide - Series 01 Model Analysis and Validation US Jun, 2011 Georgia State Guideline DSF BIM Guidelines & Standards US Jul, 2009 State of Wisconsin Standard BIM Development Criteria and Standards for Design & Construction Projects (aka "CoSA BIM Standards") US Jan, 2011 City of San Antonio Standard NYC BIM Guidelines US Jul, 2012 New York City Guideline

 

Higher Educational Institution BIM Project Execution Planning Guide US May, 2011 Penn State Guideline MIT CAD & BIM Guidelines & BIM Execution Plan US Apr, 2012 MIT Guideline Georgia Tech BIM Requirements & Guidelines for Architects, Engineers and Contractors US Sep, 2011 Georgia Tech Guideline USC BIM Guidelines US Apr, 2012 USC Guideline IU BIM Guidelines & Standards for Architects, Engineers, and Contractors US Jul, 2012 IU Guideline SDCCD BIM Standards for Architects, Engineers & Contractors US Jan, 2012 SDCCD Guideline Attachment D - BIM Execution Plan US Mar, 2012 Texas A&M Guideline Attachment G - University of Washington CAD and BIM Standards, PDF Requirements, and CAD Compliance Review Submittals US Apr, 2012 UW Standard ACCD BIM Design-Bid-Build Standards US Jun, 2011 LACCD Standard LACCD BIM Design-Build Standards US Jun, 2010 LACCD Standard

 

Construction industry moving to maximize geospatial content

At the SPAR International conference Kevin Gilson, Director of the Design Visualization group at  Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) gave an insightful presentation on integrated 3D modeling and visualization for large transportation projects with some examples from several of the projects that PB is engaged in.  The central message that I came away with is that more and more geospatial data is being incorporated in documenting and visualization large construction projects.  The term reality capture has been in use for a number of years, but at SPAR I came across the term reality computing  which has been applied to computing that uses spatial data captured using a variety of geospatial data techniques including LiDAR, optical/IR, oblique imagery, and satellite and aerial imagery as input.  This is moving in the direction of making spatial data a foundation for BIM and other data used in the construction industry.

PB has more than 30 staff dedicated to 3D modeling and visualization and has been using  innovative processes that integrate 3D, BIM, and geospatial for many years to gain efficiencies on large municipal transportation projects. Recent projects for which Kevin provided examples include the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (SFOBB) East Span, San Francisco's Presidio Parkway, Seattle's Alaskan Way Viaduct, and the I-95 New Haven Harbor Crossing Corridor Improvement.

Kevin pointed out that the use of intelligent computer models and processes such as Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Civil Integrated Management (CIM) is transforming the delivery of transportation programs. CIM is the term promoted by the Federal Highway Administration under the Every Day Counts initiative. Owners, designers, and contractors are using these processes to design, build, and simulate projects virtually before executing them in reality. The use of virtual modeling increases communication and coordination among project stakeholders by providing an easily accessible vision of the entire project. 3D, 4D models (x,y,z and time), and 5D (x,y,z,time, and $) reduce risks, errors, and inefficiencies that are common to more traditional forms of project management.

The major trends that Kevin sees are contributing to this transformation of construction are 3D integrated models that extend across the lifecycle from design through build and operate and maintain, integration of increasing amounts of geospatial data from a variety of reality capture techniques, the use of LiDAR to provide as-built data not only from scans at the end of the project, but during construction, real-time monitoring including sensors and applications that operate in near real-time, and mobile devices.  In addition many cities are developing 3D models and are making them available to designers, architects and engineers so they design structures in an accurate urban context.  This is important for sustainability, but is critical when certain areas and structures strictly have to be avoided.  Kevin gave the examples of a cemetery very close to the projected Doyle Drive right of way, and a heritage building very close to the I-95 harbour crossing.  Another example is viewports that cities like London and Vancouver have protected in by-laws.

The PB Design Visualization team uses a very eclectic suite of tools which highlights how critical standards for interoperability that cross discipline and vendor boundaries ( for example,GIS, BIM, energy performance modeling, 3D visualization, simulation, project management) are becoming.

Geospatial
ESRI, Global Mapper, Infraworks
CADD
Microstation/InRoads/GeoPak, AutoCAD/Civil3D, Revit, Solidworks
Visualization
3DS Max, Sketchup, Realtime-UDK, Unity
Collboration/4D
Navisworks, Navigator, Synchro

Using an integrated 3D model-based approach increases communication and coordination among all project stakeholders resulting in a greater level of confidence in the design, the schedule, and the overall execution of the program among the construction team and owners. The end result is reduced rework and reduced risk of cost and schedule overruns.  Conflicts/issues are identified and resolved earlier in the process, visualization helps non-technical stakeholders get involved in the decision-making process and reduces the risk of surprises at project completion.  Kevin also sees the new approach as producing benefits such as greater sustainability that extend over the full lifecycle - design, construction, and operate and maintain.

In summary integrated 3D modeling programs benefit design team, construction planning, stakeholder communications through

• better communication/collaboration
• conflicts resolved sooner
• more sustainable and efficient

Kevin recommends starting with a robust BIM/3D modeling plan and specification including

• real-world coordinate system
• defined roles and responsibilities including a model manager
• specified 3D model level-of-detail (level of development)
• specified model deliverables

3D is transforming the construction industry and helping to build a new world

Increasing urbanisation, pressure on existing infrastructure, push for productivity in construction sector and environmental concerns are driving the convergence of geospatial, 3D and information modeling technologies.

Over the next two decades, construction of buildings and infrastructure (electric power, water/wastewater, roads and highways, and ports and airports) will see a massive infusion of investment, motivated by environmental concerns and the need to accelerate economic development.  As governments are discovering that they have less and less money for capital infrastructure projects, a greater proportion of the investment in infrastructure will come from the private sector, which will drive increasing productivity to improve returns on investment. As with other industries facing a productivity challenge, this translates into an investment in technology. The accelerating adoption of 3D technologies includes 3D visualisation, 3D building information modelling (BIM), 3D GIS, 3D CAD, 3D reality capture such as laser scanning (LiDAR) and ground penetrating radar (GPR), 3D photogrammetry from satellites, aircraft and UAVs, and technologies that enable 3D measurement such as oblique imagery is transforming the construction industry in important areas.

In a just published article in Geospatial World I discuss how 3D data and technologies integrated with geospatial and other technologies are being applied to model buildings, infrastructure, and entire urban environments ranging from individual buildings to neighbourhoods to cities, how this is feasible using today’s technology, and how it is already transforming the construction industry.

ncreasing urbanisation, pressure on existing infrastructure, push for productivity in construction sector and environmental concerns are driving the convergence of geospatial and 3D technologies across businesses. - See more at: http://geospatialworld.net/Magazine/MArticleView.aspx?aid=30905&utm_content=buffer67319&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer#sthash.MsgzMTNR.dpuf

Convergence of BIM, geospatial, imagery and 3D enables new vertical industry solutions

Earlier this year I was invited to give a keynote at the South Africa Surveying and Mapping Indaba.  PositionIT has just published the paper Geospatial Information Technology Enables Vertical Industry Solutions based on my keynote.

Over half of the world's 6 billion population lives in cities and this proportion is expected to increase as we move toward 9 billion by 2050. This driving investment in new and refurbished buildings and infrastructure.  The world's construction industry including buildings, electric power, water and wastewater, roads, rail, and sea ports and airports contributes about $7 trillion annually or 10% of the world GDP.  Over the next two decades these sectors will see a massive infusion of investment estimated in the range $20 to $50 trillion.  In addition, as governments find they have less and less money for capital infrastructure projects, a greater proportion of the investment in infrastructure will come from the private sector, which will drive an increased focus on productivity to improve returns on investment.  That in turn is driving a transformation of the construction industry that is reflected in accelerating adoption of vertical industry solutions based on integrated BIM, imagery, geospatial, 3D visualization, and geospatially-enabled data management. 

The article presents some real-world examples of the application of converged BIM, imagery, geospatial, and 3D solutions.

• In the construction world 3D modeling and model-based design which integrate BIM, GIS and survey, and laser-scanning (LiDAR) in a 3D visualization environment are increasingly being used to reduce the risk of budget and schedule overruns.  Parsons-Brinckerhoff, part of the the large global construction firm Balfour Beatty, has been a leader in applying 3D modeling for design validation, clash detection, parameteric modeling, and design visualization during design and 4D modeling (time+3D), 5D (cost+time+3D) for construction scheduling during construction.
• Laser scanning (LiDAR) has become an integral part of the 3D construction process.  For example, construction monitoring involves capturing construction progress as well as being able to automate the process of checking for divergence from design when contractors for a variety of reasons don't build what is designed.
• Heathrow's Map Live system allows everyone within the business to query, including geospatial query, retrieve and view information about the geolocation about Heathrow's underground infrastructure.
• City of Las Vegas's intelligent 3D model of one and half miles of Main Street in the older part of Las Vegas provides access to geolocation information about Las Vegas's below and above ground facilities including roadways, utilities and telecommunications, as well as buildings.
• Los Angeles Community College District's created 3D BIM models of all the buildings including interior power, water, mechanical, and lighting systems together with 2D models of underground infrastructure on the nine LACCD campuses.
• Energy performance analysis helps architects and engineers to optimize energy usage of new buildings, often motivated by programs such as LEED certification.  By integrating a 3D BIM model with the geolocation of the building and surrounding natural and man-made structures and local environmental conditions, an energy performance analysis is often able to reduce annual energy consumption and power bills by 40%.

These real-world examples show that the application of converged BIM, imagery, geospatial and 3D technology to vertical industries is not star wars, but is already feasible with existing technology.

Towards spatial standards for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Geospatial information is a cross-cutting requirement critical to many different domains.  Therefore the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has entered into alliances with standards organizations in many different sectors from buildings to transportation to utilities and real estate. Many of these organizations collaborate with the OGC on standards development, particularly when an interoperability solution depends on consistency between standards from different standards development organizations. 

The OGC collaborates with over twenty different standards organizations including the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), International Augmented Reality Standards Coordination group, IEEE Technical Committee 9 (Sensor Web), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), ISO Technical Committee 211 (ISO TC/211) - Geographic information/Geomatics, National Institute for Building Standards (NIBS), Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), buildingSMART alliance, and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to name just a few.

Standards for the Internet of Things

As an example, the OGC and International Telecommunications Union Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) are jointly collaborating on the advancement of standards for the Internet of Things (IoT).  As part of this effort the OGC has submitted the OGC Open GeoSMS standard for adoption through the ITU.  In addition the ITU-T has just published a ITU-T Technology Watch Report: Location matters: Spatial standards for the Internet of Things, written by staff and members of the OGC in collaboration with the ITU Secretariat.  The objective of the ITU-T Technology Watch publications are to survey the ICT landscape to capture new topics for standardization activities.  The objective of this report is to help stakeholders understand spatial standards for Social-Local-Mobile markets and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Spatial standards for communications

Wireless mobile devices are not only consumers of data; but are also producers of data. Different kinds of data such as text, imagery, video, and spatial data require different sets of standards. The Pew Research Center’s “Internet & American Life Project” reported that by February 2012 74% of smartphone owners were using their devices to get directions and other location-related information.  And this seems to be increasing.  A previous survey in May 2011, found that 55% were using their phones for location-related infirmation.  Today all new smartphones are location-enabled with built-in GPS chips.

Location-enabled applications are being used in many sectors including transportation, emergency response, disaster management, environmental sampling, meteorological and oceanographic research, municipal and utility maintenance operations, and location marketing.

Spatial standards enable interoperability through the exchange of spatial data between software systems. The spatial standards community is concerned with the consistent encoding of location data and the use of well-defined, consistent service interfaces for finding, accessing and invoking spatial and associated data.

Communicating simple latitude-longitude coordinates requires a standard. The point data type of the Geography Markup Language (GML) or the coordinate parameter of Open GeoSMS, is a standard that has been submitted to ITU for adoption as an ITU-T Recommendation.  There are many Earth coordinate reference systems or projections (CRS) in use today, so specification of the CRS is critical.  GML is a joint OGC/ISO standard that defines an XML grammar for encoding and transporting geospatial content including coordinate system. GML is vendor and technology neutral and is designed so that any kind of geospatial information can be encoded.  The standard enables cities and countries to provide vendor-neutral public access to data about elevation, water bodies, transportation infrastructure, population density, land cover, vegetation, geology and other data layers that comprise spatial data infrastructure. GML is embedded in international encoding standards for domains such as weather, aviation, hydrology, geology, augmented reality, and emergency response.

Geospatial standards must meet interoperability requirements beyond defining a standard way to express a lat-long coordinate. Standards define and provide consistent ways to exchange and process Earth referenced data that may be encoded using grid cells, vectors, polygons or other methods of representing Earth features. Interoperability is essential because in today's web environment these operations are more commonly performed on distributed systems than in a GIS running on a single computer.

Gaps

While GML and related standards give smartphone app developers access to geospatial resources that enable interoperability, critical gaps remain.

While outdoor location systems are well defined and widely used, the same is not true for indoor navigation.. Users expect a seamless transition when entering a building, but this is not currently possible. There is no single technology that provides for uniform coverage of positioning information indoors. 

Things in the Internet of Things all have location and many of these things are inside buildings. The location of a sensing device such as a digital thermometer in a building is highly relevant to applications that use data from that sensor.   Access to accurate information about buildings including the location of sensors is becoming increasingly important. Building Information (BIM)-based standards are needed to provide building information, such as the location of devices, throughout a building’s lifecycle.

BIM standards and other built environment standards also require open standards for communicating information about spatial data provenance and rights of ownership and access. Data provenance involves tracking not only rights and the lineage of data through many operations, but also information about uncertainty and quality.

Systems for design (BIM, CAD and Civil Engineering software) and systems for observation and management (sensors, imaging and geospatial processing) were created by different professional communities to solve different kinds of problems. Despite these differences, progress toward interoperation is accelerating as the concept of intelligent citiesi becomes more compelling for both government and business.

Spatial standards affect many sectors

Spatial standards enable people to communicate about features and phenomena that have a particular location on the Earth. Open spatial standards offer extraordinary socio-economic value, and evidence of this can be found in several application domains including emergency and disaster management and response, smart Infrastructure for transportation; public works; electricity, natural gas, water and sewage utilities where there is pressure to become more efficient and to address issues such as fossil fuel depletion, water shortages, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and the sanitation needs of growing cities.

Surveying/civil/geospatial interoperability is part of a longstanding set of challenges that includes BIM interoperability and 3D modeling interoperability. The OGC CityGML Encoding Standard for 3D modeling provides a foundational part of the solution. The Netherlands has made CityGML-encoded 3D data a key part of their National Spatial Data Infrastructure. One major BIM standards effort is the conversion of  buildingSMART International's Industry Foundation Classes to service interfaces and encodings that are consistent with CityGML and with service-oriented computing in general. Standards organizations working on intelligent cities and smart infrastructure need to consider open spatial standards to enable interoperability between the many different domains comprising modern cities.

The OGC has been working with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) since mid-2009 to improve water management by improving the discoverability, accessibility and usability of water information. Part of this effort is WaterML 2.0, a standard for encoding water observation time series enables linking local, regional, national and global water information sources into connected water information networks.

Spatial standards efforts underway

Open GeoSMS

The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) contributed its Open GeoSMS specification to the OGC in 2009. Open GeoSMS facilitates the communication of location content in Short Message Service (SMS) transmissions. SMS is a feature in every mobile phone; all mobile phones therefore have the potential to communicate location information in a standard way.

Augmented Reality (AR)

AR allows the user to see the real world with virtual objects superimposed upon or composited with the real world.  Kocation based services used with smartphones and other types of mobile technology are a major driving force behind AR’s entering the mainstream.  To further development of AR standards in 2010 the OGC became an active participant in an International Augmented Reality Standards Coordination group.

IndoorGML

Indoor location is getting a lot of attention primarily because of the commercial opportunities it enables. Beyond locating a mobile device in an indoor environment, the indoor environment presents a number of standardization challenges, such as how navigation directions are supplied (take the elevator to the 3rd floor and turn right); semantics (my first floor is not your first floor); special zones (heating, security, Wi-Fi, etc.); and the lack of a standard for modeling and encoding floor plans. In addition, indoor navigation must necessarily be 3D. The objective of the OGC's IndoorGML initiative is to enable the representation and exchange of the geo-information required to build and operate indoor navigation systems.

Sensor Interface for Internet of Things

The OGC has recongnized the growing importance of the IoT for some time.  In 2001 the OGC took on the task of standardizing sensor communication because every sensor has a location, whether in situ (such as a rain gauge) or remote (such as an Earth imaging device), and the location of a sensor is highly significant for many applications. The resulting suite of SWE standards – now being implemented worldwide – enables developers to make networked sensors, transducers and sensor-data repositories discoverable, accessible and useable via the Web or other networks.  The OGC created a standards working group (SWG) for a “Sensor Interface for IoT/WoT”. The scope of work for this SWG is to develop a candidate standard for access to sensors in an IoT/WoT environment.

SimCity with real data: modeling real cities in 3D in a Web environment

At FOSS4G in Nottingham I was looking forward to hearing Peter Smart and Rob Hawkes talk about their ViziCities project which is intended to bring real world cities to life using open, big-data and open source technologies including WebGL (3D), Web Audio API, GeoJSON, Web Workers (HTML5 multi-threading), and PostGIS. But they weren't able to make it.  Fortunately their web site and blog contain a lot of information about the development of the Vizicities project.

Peter and Rob describe Vizicities as an interactive 3D city vizualisation platform that is beautiful, fun and engaging, the intersection of data, art and play.  It has been described as SimCity with real data.  And the SimCity relationship is more than skin deep.  The authors themselves say that "It's undeniably SimCity-esque though will encompass many aspects beyond that comparison; ranging from data visualisation, to game design, art, and general awesomeness."  And it appears that Richard Shemaka, the principle engineer at Maxis for data layers in SimCity is a fan of the project.

Data sources

The data is from free data sources for London and the UK like Data.gov.uk, the London Datastore, Ordnance Survey OpenData, OpenStreetMap, the Office for National Statistics, and Police.uk for most of what was needed (census data, crime, geographic features).  Finding accurate building outline and height data is a problem in the UK. They've had to make do with simple building outlines from Ordnance Survey's VectorMap dataset. Unfortuantely this does not include height data for the buildings so they've had to kludge this.

3D visualization including thematic and heat maps

They first focussed on visualizing buildings, natural features, and roads in 3D.  A secondary focus of the project is the visualization of thematic data such as demographics.  This includes heat maps.

London Underground in 3D and real-time

One of the objectives from the beginning was to visualize public transport in London in real-time and 3D. They started with the London Underground network in 3D with the aim to place real-time trains moving along 3D tracks.  You can see a video of the result.  Remarkable.

Even more remarkably this has all been developed since February which shows the power of modern open source web development technologies.