Between the Poles

Smart cities: BIM, GIS and the internet of things

At the AGI Geocommunity Conference Dr Andrew Hudson-Smith, Director of the  Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA)  at The Bartlett, University College London, gave a fascinating introduction to the topic of smart cities and how the integration of BIM and geospatial is key to enabling smart cities.

The statistics are incredible.  This really is the era of big data.  Every day we create 2.5 quintillion (10¹⁸) bytes of data.  According to IBM 90% of the data in the world today was created in the last two years. The data comes from sensors, social media sites, videos and digital images including those from from satellites, commercial transactions, cell phones, smart meters, weather and environmental monitoring equipment, and many ither intelligent electronic devices.  Every person has become a mobile sensor, many GPS enabled. There is even a scale that will tweet your weight. Incredibly, every minute there are 100,000 tweets, Google handles 2,000,000 search requests and users share 684,478 pieces of content on Facebook.  A lot of this data includes location either explicitly or via textual analysis.

Andrew talked about the rise of big data (a lot of it generated by cities) and the importance of linking Building Information Modelling (BIM) to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), citizen or crowd-sourced science and the internet of things. His main point is that the linkage of these four things is the key to the generation of the future smart city.

ESRI UC: 3D and other themes of this year's conference

According to Jack Dangermond who led the plenary sessions on the first day,  this year in San Diego 12000 people from 130 countries were in San Diego for the 33rd Esri International User Conference.

I gravitated primarily to the utility sessions.  According to Bill Meehan, who is responsible for ESRI's utility business, there were 750 utility folks at this year's UC.

GIS is everywhere

GIS is being used in diveerse areas including environmental monitoring, climate change, permafrost melting, sea level rise, agriculture, water resources, aquaculture, pollution remediation, energy resources management, land information systems, urban design, utility network management, wasteshed modeling, utility pole inspection, sewer rehabilitation, port management, indoor GIS, iInsurance risk management, health-related mapping, law enforcement, mapping where space debris might fall, flood risk mapping, storm tracking and damage assessment,  geodesign, crowdsourcing for collecting a variety of data, interoperabilty, citizen engagement, government transparency, cartography, geology and mining, automatic generalization of different scale maps, story maps, portals for infrastructure, and open data, to mention just a few of the things that were singled out in the plenary session. 

Some of the areas that were singled out  for special recognition were

• Special Achievements in GIS award went to the Dartmouth Atlas for showing geographically how outcomes and the cost of medical procedures varies depending on location across the U.S. 
• The Hong Kong Lands Department received the Enterprise GIS award for their land management system which they started in the 1990's and is now in its second generation. 
• Tbe President's Award went to Direct Relief which distributes different types of equipment to people around the globe in need with 99% efficiency according to Forbes.

Themes

The theme of this UC was GIS transforming our world, not only changing the physical world as we know it, but also changing our perception of the world and how GIS has and will fundamentally help us collectively build a better future.  A classic example that has impacted everyone on the planet is GPS or more generally GNSS.   As a number of speakers including Dangermond said we are never lost any more and that is fundamental change to how we perceive the world.

Some of the major themes that emerged at this UC are common to many software and service providers in the IT sector, but some of these are new or unique to ESRI. 

Climate change

We are facing serious global challenges, in particular climate change, which both at the Geodesign Summit and at this UC conference appears to be a personal challenge for Dangermond who sees GIS as contributing in major way in creating a more sustainable future.  He sees GIS helping to change how we think and act and how we do basic things such as design. 

GIS across the organization

A theme that was pervasive throughout the conference including in the utility sessions was the need to make GIS pervasive across the organization because 90% of the data that organizations are collecting and managing has location.  This was also true in utility sessions I attended, where the thrust is to expand the use of GIS outside of the traditional area of records management into other departments.

Vertical industry "templates"

In the utility and telecommunications sectors there is a major effort underway to create preconfigured vertical "templates" for specific vertical industries.  In the utility sector one was announced yesterday for the electric power Industry, and others are underway for gas and telecommunications.  These templates are a collection of data and tools for vertical industries and are available as open source on Github.

Web

The web was pervasive, It was hard to find a session where the theme that desktop GIS is being transformed into web GIS did not come up.  It doesn't mean that the desktop is going to go away in the near future, but sharing data, applications, and apps is being recognized as a common goal and web GIS makes this very easy to do.  This includes web portals for accessing enterprise data over the web.

Cloud

A lot of the traditonal desktop GIS capabilities are now being made available in the cloud so that all you need is an iOS or Android device or a web browser.  This is also available to large enterprises who need to keep their data on their own servers for security reasons.  Cindy Salas from Centerpoint Energy demonstrated ESRI's cloud capability but running "on premise" completely wthin Centerpoint's fire wall. 

Integration

Being able to integrate location and the spatial dimension into enterprise applications such as ERP (SAP), business intelliegence (IBM Cognos), Salesforce, MS Dynamics, and Excel spreadsheets is a new focus for ESRI.   They have already created plugins for several well-known applications.

Mobile devices

In the past when you talked about mobile in the context of utilities, you were normally dealing with Panasonic Toughbooks which could cost up to $6 000 each.  At this conference just about every application was able to run on a variety of low cost mobile devices including iOS and Android mobile devices.  One of the sessions I attended was about the National Broadband rollout in Australia where the 500 field folks who are doing 300 000 pit inspections were all equipped with iPads, which you might have thought were too fragile for pretty rough field work..  This project has been underway for something like 18 months and todate only two of the iPads have been damaged.

Big data

Spatial data volumes whether from sensors at utilities, from LIDAR scanning of transmission lines, or from earth obsevration satellited are now reckoned in terabytes.  There were sessions on spatially enabling Hadoop, SAP HANA and other big data management systems for managing these data volumes.

Real-time

In the utility track managing real-tme data from sensors on transformers, smart meters, phasors, and other devices and enabling near real-time decision making was a common theme.  A general event processing capability that can be triggered by rules has been added to the quiver to make this possible for any data stream. 

In the area of imagery, Digital Globe imagery can be accessed with 4-5 hours of acquisition.

Analytics

Big data and real-time means that we need to be able to understand what these huge volumes of data are telling us and then enable decision-making, automated or human mediated, as rapidly as possible.  If a transformer is running hot, we can't wait a week until the next service check to reconfigure the network because by then we may have reduced it projected lifetime by 10%.  There were "location analytics" sessions in most of the vertical industry sessions including utilities.

Content

Software companies like ESRI and Hexagon are now in the content busines.  And with the data beng made available in the cloud, you can access it through web GIS or desktop GIS. The data includes traditional topographic maps, digital terrain models, imagery from earth observation satellites from Digital Globe and others some of it near real-time (fr example, from Digital Globe within 4-5 hours of acqusition), demographics, and others.

Dangermond's term for this is the "living atlas" because this body of content is intended to be dynamic, real-rime and comprehensive.  The goal seems to be all the data you would need to manage the planet.

Some of the content explicitly mentioned includes

• basemaps
• community. content
• imagery
• 30 cm coverage of the US
• 60 cm coverage of Western Europe
• imagery for the middle east and asia in total covering 2/3 of the world
• health
• lifestyle
• economics
• demographics, at the zip code, county, state, and national levels
• scientific maps including environmental, energy, infrastructure, and terrain models
• landscape layers

This data is accessible to web and desktop applications and makes it very easy to do standard spatial analytical things like multi-criteria suitability or site selection mapping.  Users can also publish their own data to the cloud.

Education

This has always been a strong focus area for ESRI and from Dangermond's perspective with the challenges the world is facing, GIS professionals will be even more critical in the future.  There is focus on advancing spatial literacy to a broader audience than in the past.

LiDAR

Laser scanning is a major source of important data for the construction industry (right of way determination and construction progress monitoring), utilities (transmission vegetation management), and other industries.  ESRI has made this a focus area and there were a number of sessions devoted to managing and analyzing point cloud data.

3D

Dangermond specifically singled out 3D as a major capability area for ESRI.  There are specialized 3D products, but 3D is also being built into ESRI main stream GIS and spatial analytical products.

3D city models

At the plenary there was a demonstration of how to quickly build a 3D city model from 2D data, including extruding buildings from a 3D building footprint and height, adding textures depending on building types, and then tools for analysis such as zoning and shadow analysis and visualization including flythroughs.  These models are sharable on the cloud as web scenes requiring only a web browser (with no plugins) or iOS mobile devices.

Geodesign

At the UC ESRI is demonstrating a prototype of a product designed specifically for geodesign.

Open data

Dangermond specifically mentioned the newest national open data initiative in Peru. 

Crowdsourcing/volunteered data

There are sessions specifically on editing and manipulating OpenStreetMap data.

Open source project for 3D urban models supporting crowdsourced data and smart services

Yesterday at the INSPIRE conference, Federico Prandi gave a presentation about a fascinating open source project called i-SCOPE that involves developing 3D urban models that can be used to provide interactive smart services.

The concept is to develop 3D Urban Information Models (UIM) from accurate urban-scale geospatial information as a basis for smart web services based on geometric, semantic, morphological and structural information at urban scale level.  This information can be used by local governments improve decision-making on issues related to urban planning, promote inclusion among various users groups (e.g. elder or disabled citizens), involve citizens collecting geo-referenced information based on location based services.  i-SCOPE provides an open platform on which ‘smart city’ services can be developed.

The models are based on CityGML 2.0.  CityGML includes 3D geometry, topology, semantics, and appearance for urban environments. CityGML also supports a standard mechanism for adding extensions, called Application Domain Extensions (ADEs).  There are several Application Domain Extensions (ADEs) that have been developed to extend CityGML to other domains.  For example,  I blogged about a basic extension UtilityNetworksADE that was proposed for city utility networks.

The I-SCOPE project has three very practical goals

• Improved inclusion and personal mobility of aging and disabled citizens through an accurate city-level personal routing service which accounts for detailed urban layout, features and barriers.
• Optimization of energy consumption through a service for accurate assessment of solar energy potential and energy loss at the building level.
• Environmental monitoring through a real-time environmental noise mapping service leveraging citizen’s involvement will who act as distributed sensors city-wide measuring noise levels through their mobile phones.

The concept is to develop ADEs to extend CityGML 2.0 for these three application areas.

Crowdsourcing

A very interesting and innovative aspect of the project is to use crowdsourcing to collect data for two of the application areas, mobility and noise mapping.  For example, for noise mapping the idea is to create real-time and aggregated noise maps through data collected by citizens who use of their mobile phones as noise sensors measuring city-wide noise levels.  In this way citizens are involved as prosumers (producers and consumers) of environmental data.

Some of the challenges of this approach that Federico discussed include estimating statistical significance, verifying the accuracy of citizen reported noise levels, and relating noise levels to specific features of the city model.

Compatibility between CityGML and INSPIRE Buildings data

The INSPIRE Data Specifications Annex III contains use cases encodings and a data model for Buildings.  The devlopment of this schema was strongly influenced by CityGML, an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard developed initially in Germany by Thomas Kolbe, but now widely used around the world.  However, there are differences that mean that applications developed for CityGML are not able to be used directly with INSPIRE Buildings data.

INSPIRE  supports Level of Detail (LoD) 1-4 and includes four profiles, Core2D, Core3D, Extended2D, and Extended3D.  It also includes six application schemas.

CityGML, available since March 2012 as Version 2, includes 3D geometry, topology, semantics, and appearance and supports LoD 0 to 4.

CityGML also supports a standard mechanism for adding extensions, called Application Domain Extensions (ADEs).  There are several Application Domain Extensions (ADEs) that have been developed to extend CityGML to other domains.  For example,  I blogged about a basic extension UtilityNetworksADE that was proposed for city utility networks.

Today at the INSPIRE conference, Tatjana Kutzer gave a very germane presentation on how to use ADE to map CityGML data model onto the INSPIRE Buildings data model.  She then showed practially how to use Safe Software's FME to migrate CityGML data directly to the INSPIRE Buildings schema.  She gave a practical demonstration of doing that for LoD 2.

In response to a question from the audience, she said that the next version of CityGML will incorporate some of the specifications from INSPIRE Buildings that would move in the direction of harmonizing the two models.

Increased urbanization is creating megaregions

I've blogged about the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor, (DMIC) a huge US$ 90 billion project 1,483 km in length linking Delhi and Mumbai.   The objective of the DMIC is to create a base for economic development by providing  access to the best state-of-the-art infrastructure. This project includes nine large Industrial zones of about 200-250 km²., a high speed freight line, three ports, six airports and a 4000 MW power plant.  An influence region of 150 km on either side of the freight line comprises the DMIC.  It strikes me that what is being created is a megaregion, a concept that is getting a lot of attention in the United States,

A megaregion is a new scale of geography that blurs the traditional boudaries between metropolitan regions, like what the DMIIC is doing with respect to Mumbai, Delhi and other smaller cities.  These population centers include Interlocking economic systems, shared natural resources and ecosystems, and common transportation systems. Population growth and increasing urbanization are the driving forces behind megaregions.

America2050 has defined 11 megaregions in the United States.  Megaregions are defined by relationships that define a common interest..  According to Amerca2500 the five major categories of relationships that define megaregions are:

• Environmental systems and topography
• Infrastructure systems
• Economic linkages
• Settlement patterns and land use
• Shared culture and history

Most of a country's rapid population growth and economic expansion is expected to occur in these megaregions.

These aggregations are so large that they need to be modeled and managed as smart cities.  For example, the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC) is intended to be comprised of seven smart cities.  According to URENIO these smart cities are compact, vertical developments.  They use digital technology to create smart grids for better management of civic infrastructure.  They have an efficient public transportation system.  They recycle sewage water for industrial use.  Green spaces, cycle tracks and easy accessibility to goods, services and activities are designed to foster a sense of community..  They have underground utility corridors for parking, sewage disposal and communication lines.  Public transport is available within a 10-minute walk from home or office.

Time required to create 3D city models dropping rapidly

At the HxGN conference in Las Vegas today, there were some very interesting new technologies.

Juergen Dold, President of Hexagon Geosystems, showed some images from a recent project in Zurich West, where the Zurich suburb was flown Monday and the finished 3D model was available by Friday.  The model does not have intelligence.  Basically it's  a massing model with photorealistic texturing, but for many applications especially for visualization, that is really all that is required.

Dold said that they expect that it will be possible to get this down to hours.

Infrastructure excellence competition

Infrastructure-excellence.com is hosting the second annual competition showcasing Excellence in Infrastructure— highlighting the best projects done in 2012/2013. The winners will be given over US$10,000 in prizes by the competition sponsors.  The competition is open to anyone 21 years and older who is planning, designing, building, and managing infrastructure projects.  Project types may include the following:

• Transportation (roads and highways, rail, airports, or bridges)
• Land development (commercial sites, subdivisions, public parks, or recreation)
• Water (distribution, water resources, dams and levees, or wastewater)
• Energy (electric and gas distribution, electric transmission, and substation design)
• Urban planning

Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society

On Thursday and Friday of this week the Centre for Spatial Law and Policy is co-hosting a conference with Harvard University's Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA), Berkman Center of Internet and Society and Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The conference, titled "Creating the Policy and Legal Framework for a Location-enabled Society" will be live-streamed and combines leaders from many of the diverse aspects of the geospatial community (many of whom are members of the Centre) with internationally-recognized academics and researchers from Harvard and other top universities.

If you have some time on Thursday and Friday  you can watch/listen to the conference over the web.  Details will be posted here.

SPAR 2013: Developing an intelligent 3D model of above and below ground infrastructure for the City of Las Vegas

At SPAR 2013 Keith Warren, BIM/3D SUE Manager at VTN Consulting gave a fascinating presentation on the 3D above and below ground model of city infrastructure including roads, utilities, telecom, and buildings that VTN has developed with the City of Las Vegas.  Keith believes that at the present time Las Vegas' 3D city infrastructure model is unique in North America.

This model also represents a classic example of the benefits of convergence, the integration of engineering design data including building information models (BIM), geospatial data including digital terrain models, high resolution photogrammetry, and point clouds derived from laser scanning, together with 3D visualization technology.

Education

About five years ago the City of Las Vegas approached VTN because they saw some potential value in 3D modeling.  At that time the city had had little experience with 3D modeling.  VTN has a broad range of in-house capabilities spannng engineering (traffic, public works, and 3D subsurface utility engineering), survey including laser scanning, GIS, building information modeling, and visualization.  Over the next two years VTN focused on education, working with the city and other utility agencies to introduce them to 3D modeling and visualization technology.  VTN organized workshops with the city, local utiltiies including the water district, and other public agencies to educate them in some of the capabilities of the new technology.  At the same time they worked with the city and other public agencies to understand the problems they were facing.

Challenge: subsurface utility engineering (SUE)

One of the problems that was identified repeatedly in these workshops, not only at the City but also at the utilities, was hitting underground infrastructure during excavations.  According to national statistics, in the United States an underground utility line is hit on average every 60 seconds.  The total cost to the national economy is estimated to be in the billions of dollars.  The problems is that in most municipalities in North America, for years underground utility lines have been put in the ground not according to plan but wherever it has been easiest and cheapest to build them.  In addition 2D as-builts of underground infrastructure are unreliable.  The result is that in most municipalities the location of underground utiltiies is very poorly known.  This was the situation in Las Vegas.

Since the city had been educated on 3D modeling technology by VTN, they decided that this technology could provide a solution for the problem of locating underground utilities.  The City decided to go ahead with a project to model one and half miles of Main Street in the older part of Las Vegas.  The project was intended to model below and above ground facilities including roadways, utilities and telecommunications, and buildings.

The project also specified implementation of a new low distortion geospatial coordinate system to make it possible to support engineering grade accuracy for geolocating infrastructure.

Reality capture

Buildings were modeled in several ways, including extruding a building footprint from a GIS, using building models from the Sketchup 3D Warehouse, laser scanning existing structures, and complete BIM models for newer buildings provided by architects. 

A variety of techniques were used for reality capture of underground utilities and other infrastucture includng GIS, survey, design records, test holes, and ground penetrating radar (GPR).  Above ground utilities were captured by combining GIS data with mobile laser scanning. 

In the future to improve data quality for underground infrastructure, since the City owns most of the right of ways within Las Vegas proper (some is owned by the Nevada DOT), it has mandated that in the future contractors are required to use open trenching for utiities and all work has to be surveyed before the trench is closed. 

Intelligent city infrastructure model

The deliverable was a set of 3D models of all the underground and aboveground infrastructure and buildings for the one and a half mile corridor of Main Street in old Las Vegas.   Engineering design and other data was combined with the City's geoimagery, digital terrain models and other GIS data. The models were designed to run with the software that Las Vegas already had including Civil 3D, Navisworks, ESRI ArcGIS and Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler (Infraworks).

Augmented reality

Working with a partner VTN developed an application for the iPad that allowed underground facilities to be viewed virtually under the actual roadway.

Map-21 and Every Day Counts

Map-21 and Every Day Counts are Federal Highway Authority (FHWA) initiatives that are designed to encourage the adoption of 3D modeling.  MAP-21 (Moving ahead for progress in the 21st Century) requires 3D modeling and virtual construction and visualization technology for all eligible projects.  The Federal government will provide matching funding on projects using intelligent 3D modeling and visualization of up to 5% fo project costs.  The Map-21 initiative was announced last July, but it turns out that what Las Vegas has done is in Keith's estimation 80-90% compliant with Map-21 guidelines.

Every Day Counts is another FHWA initiative that encourages 3D modeling.  According to the FHWA 3D modeling in transportation construction allows for faster, more accurate and more efficient planning and construction. The FHWA foresees that as the benefits are more widely recognized, many in the U.S. highway industry will transition to 3D modeling over the traditional two-dimensional (2D) design process.

Benefits of the intelligent 3D city infrastructure model

One of the major benefits that Las Vegas has experienced as a result of developing the intelligent 3D city infrastructure model is increased safety because of the reduced risk of unexpectedly hitting underground utilities especially hazardous ones like gas mains. 

The benefits of being able to accurately locate existing underground infrastructure are immense.  They include automated clash detection to identify potential problems when plannng, designing and constructing new undergound infrastructure.  Also there are reduced operating costs because of reduced truck rolls for cable/pipe locate operations. 

Overall the City has found that the 3D model approach provides more information per dollar invested, in other words more capabilities at lower cost.

Europe's Digital Agenda review: EUROGI recommends geospatial including BIM, open data/services and an EU property service

In 2010 the Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE) was the first thematic strategy launched under the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.  The European Commission launched the Europe 2020 Strategy with a vision to achieve high levels of employment, a low carbon economy, productivity and social cohesion.  The Digital Agenda for Europe is one of the seven flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020 Strategy.

The Digital Agenda is the European Commission's strategy for using Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to the benefit Europe's society and economy for the period 2010-2015.  The Digital Agenda is linked to various other EU policies, such as the single market, consumer protection, research and innovation, industrial policy, regional and rural development, environmental sustainability, skills and culture, or healthcare. It is expected to contribute to major challenges such as climate change and the aging population.

In 2010 the Digital Agenda for Europe was the first thematic strategy launched under the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth.  In 2011 the Digital Agenda Scoreboard reported on the first year of implementation of actions as well as on progress on performance targets.

As of 1st July 2012, the DAE is being managed by the European Commission Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CONNECT).

EUROGI's submission to the DAE mid-term review

Given what we know about the contribution of geospatial technology to GDP from Australia and New Zealand, it is surprising that the DAE does not directly reference geospatial data and technology.  And given the importance of sustainability in the goals of the DAE and the recent EC prioritization of energy efficiency, it is also surprising that it does not mention the integration of building information modeling (BIM) and geospatial.  In response to the geospatial gap EUROGI, which is the umbrella organization for European geospatial organizations, has offered recommendations as part of the mid-term review of the DAE currently taking place.

EUROGI's recommendations are

Open geospatial data and services

Identify types of public sector generated geospatial data which should be made available within a range of access models, from no cost and no restrictions on usage to those requiring payment and with access restrictions.  Across Europe barriers to the use of the data still constitute constraints. INSPIRE and the PSI Directives aim to remove these barriers,  but further measures are needed.

Geolocating digital public sector information

Geotagging the huge volume of digital data, such as text documents, spreadsheets, pictures, videos, remote sensed data, and tweets, that is produced daily by state bodies at all levels would contribute to transparency about public policy, implementation, monitoring and review.

Building information modelling and geospatial information/services

Produce an outline of how best to promote building information modelling (BIM) and its full and seamless integration with geospatial data and services.  One of the most important technology advances transforming the EU construction and building industry is BIM.  Sustainability programs like BREEAM and  LEED require natural lighting, solar radiation, wind, renewable energy, and noise analyses all of which require integration of geospatial information with the building design information which is contained in BIM models.  BIM also enables greater understanding and transparency between public client stakeholders and citizens.

Integrated property information service

Develop an outline for a comprehensive European property information service.  Trillions of Euros are invested in property across Europe and yet there is no overall integrated multi-lingual property information service which facilitates seamless tracking of trends based on location, identifies financial flows, provides property details, explores the impact of natural hazards (eg flooding, landslides etc) and other factors. It could be argued that the presence of such a service may have contributed at least to some extent to predicting the disastrous property market collapses which have taken place in certain European countries.

European location strategy

A strategy for location is required to unlock the potential of location information for supporting the objectives set out in Europe 2020 such as job creation, social inclusion and environmental and development sustainability.

Realizing the potential of spatial data infrastructures

Establish a program to support sub-national and focused thematic Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) and set out minimum and desirable specifications to facilitate interoperability between these SDIs through open APIs.

Geospatial sector in a global context

Identify ways in which European geospatial companies can better compete in the global geospatial information and services market place.  The INSPIRE initiative is recognized throughout the world as a global leader in the SDI field and yet the increasing and deepening experience in harmonization processes across different cultures and languages is not fully being exploited internationally.

Developing the geospatial skills/knowledge base

The Commission should develop a strategy for supporting the expansion and deepening of geospatial skills.  Employment in the geospatial sector is expanding at a rate which exceeds overall economic growth levels but skills shortages remain.  This creates an opportunity in memeber states with high rates of unemployment.

Emerging trends and new opportunities

Support a process of regular reviews of emerging technology trends such as Internet of Things,
remote sensing, cloud computing, open data initiatives, seamless indoor/outdoor positioning, and social media which will impact the geospatial sector in order to identify opportunities for the EU ICT sector and the public sector.