Between the Poles

Spar 3D: 3D mapping the inside of multi-story buildings with a backpack

At the Spar 3D Expo and Conference in Houston The Woodlands, Texas, Avideh Zakhor from the University of California Berkeley was onsite with some remarkable products from her new startup Indoor Reality.  I blogged previously about the technology when it was still under development.  The "man portable system" she has developed is a 32 pound backback with a collection of sensors.  The most important feature of the technology are sensors and algorithms for accurately tracking the six degrees of spatial freedom which determine the location and orientation of the backpack in the building.  In addition there are sensors for recording optical and thermal point clouds. She has also developed a handheld device that supplements  the capabilities of the backpack.

The technology can track accurately the location and orientation of the backpack as the operator walks through the building going into all rooms, halls, up and down stairs and into other human accessible spaces.  Software tools then generate different 3D data products including optical and thermal 3D point clouds, a colourized 3D point cloud, surface texture map,  and triangulated mesh surfaces.  The package includes analytical software tools for automatically generating floor plans, distinguishing rooms, identifying staircases, identifying windows, finding heat sources such as computers and human occupants, and identifying lights. Surface textures can be added to create a 3D photo-realtistic rendering.  The sensors and software can capture and generate all required input for the Department of Energy's EnergyPlus energy performance analysis program.  It has GPS and can generate real world coordinates.  Indoor Reality is an ESRI Emerging Business Partner.

I had a chance to sit down with Avideh to talk about her new company and the remarkable products she was demonstrating at SPAR2016.

Avideh, what are the key features of the products you are demonstrating here that distinguish them from some of the other devices vendors are showing here at SPAR ?

We have developed a unique way to track where the operator is in a building and the orientation of the backpack.  We have a lot of sensors. That is the key to all of our intellectual property (IP). It's called sensor fusion and most of our IP is in that area. It does not suffer from drift. It tracks accurately where you are in the building even if you go upstairs. You can even go up in an elevator because it has a barometer.  In addition we detect wifi.  It can tell you what the wifi strength is in different parts of the building. We have an infrared sensor and we have developed an app that will give you real-time occupancy of the building, for example, we can tell you there are four people in this room, two people in that room. We have patents on that.

Based on the data collected by the operator's walk through the building, we allow users to virtually navigate through the space and spatially collaborate with each other through our web based visualization tool. During virtual navigation, you can look around in 3D as if you were there.  That's our second data product. We don't just record dumb point clouds.  We generate intelligent meshes.  Not only can I can pan around, look up and down at each location, but the shape of the cursor shows you the orientation of the surface - for a horizontal surface it's a circle, for vertical surfaces it's a square.  The cursor gets bigger as it gets nearer, smaller as it goes farther away.  We know the normals of all the surfaces because of the 3D mesh behind what you see.  We recognize doors and windows.  Of course, we can measure distances and we allow users to annotate objects and locations.   So this mesh is very intelligent, so intelligent that we can automatically generate a Revit model with a floor plan, rooms, ceilings, doors and windows. That is our third data product.

How do you foresee people will use the tool ?

We went to the University of Illinois just a month ago and we did an energy model for a 14 story bldg. We can do 3d geometry, we can detect lights automatically, we can detect windows automatically, and we can detect AC plugs automatically.   This gets fed into an energy simulation model which is a complete model for an Energy Plus performance audit.  Typically when people do an energy audit they are only interested in the lowest hanging fruit, for example, replacing incandescent light bulbs with LEDs.   This is because collecting the data for a full Energy Plus model has been time consuming.  With the Indoor Reality backpack you can collect whatever you need for a complete Energy Plus audit very simply. For example, we can superimpose the infrared record on a ceiling to show a hot area which is very likely a hot water pipe behind the dry wall.

We have just come out with a visual building documentation tool for stakeholders to collaborate  with each other throughout the lifecycle of a building - during design, construction and operations and maintenance.  If I want to remodel a building using an architect, designer and contractor they can communicate with each other by leaving notes for each other in the virtual building.  For example, I can put a tag on a door for John the contractor. "Please fix this door."  John can come along in the virtual building and edit that note "Avideh, I can do this Tuesday."  So this makes it possible to collaborate virtually on a building project in 3D,  in much the same way that we can collaborate on a Word document.

There is another dimension to this.  Let's say we want to remodel a space in a building. The first thing the architect will want to see is the existing floor plan and the other professionals will also want to see other aspects of the space.  Normally at this point the building owner will ask everyone involved in the planning to come over for a  walk-through the building.   That requires a lot of valuable time from very busy people.  With the virtual model that we can generate, most of this won't be necessary any more. The owner can ask a relatively junior person equipped with the backpack to walk the building to collect the data.  Then the resulting model can be put online and everyone can virtually walk through it.  For bidding on a big renovation project, a relatively junior operator does the walk through and puts it on the cloud and the construction companies who are interested in the project can virtually walk through it online for bidding purposes.

For a new building,  during the actual construction you can conduct a walk through every day and update visually what's going on.  Then if there are lawsuits in the future, you will have a permanent record of who did what and when.   You can show the legal folks where a component was supposed to go and where it was actually installed. It is also useful for monitoring progress, so you know who did what when to determine who gets paid and how much.   If there is a lawsuit and insurance companies get involved, you can step through the record to see who did what.  Then when you want to sell the finished building, the real estate folks can do a virtual walk through of the building with prospective customers.  Property managers and facility managers can use the virtual model for maintaining the building. For example, we talked about the energy performance audit.  Facility managers can use it to identify lights that need to be replaced with more efficient bulbs. Then they can put a virtual tag on the lights for the maintenance folks.  With a virtual model like this, owners, contractors, designers, and facility managers can all collaborate throughout the lifecycle of the building.

There seems to be a lot of areas where the technology you have developed could be used ?

There are quite a number of other application areas for the technology we have identified including historical building and monument recording, scan-to-BIM,  variance detection and virtual inspection, real estate valuations, building plans for first responders, change management and dispute resolution, and detecting thermal anomalies including water leaks and insulation deficiencies to name just a few.

SPAR 3D: Virtual reality, scan to BIM, infrastructure models, and mapping indoor spaces

I have just experienced two remarkable days at the Spar 3D Expo and Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, in itself a remarkable location near Houston.  I will blog in more detail in the near future about the things and people I had the opportunity to experience over the past two days.

First of all, virtual reality.  Everyone is aware of the Oculus Rift (see the new review at CNET if you aren't).  There are other technologies that have come or are coming from Samsung, Sony and Google.  But at SPAR 3D the most remarkable VR technology I personally experienced was what David Smith, CTO of Wearaility, talked about and allowed me and others to try - a set of incredibly light-weight glasses with acrylic lenses designed to work with a smartphone that gives you a virtual experience comparable to IMAX without the IMAX theatre.  I tried it and found it an absolutely amazing surround experience.  And if you have wondered where Michael Jones, of Keyhole and Google Maps fame, has landed, he is now CEO of Wearality.

Secondly, my personal passion is the geolocation of underground utilities.  At SPAR 3D Mark Klusza, Founder & CTO, Real-time Metrology, Inc. described a major new advance in ground penetrating radar (GPR) technology he has developed that can detect a 3/4 inch rebar (among other things) four feet below the surface in clay.

For existing buildings creating a BIM model remains an art rather than science.  But at SPAR 3D a number of new technologies were presented that can help automate, improve the quality, and speed the process.  Foremost among them in my mind was presented by Nicolas Arnold, VP of Product Development, at SKUR.  With SKUR's technology, which runs in the cloud, you can compare the 3D model that you have developed with the point cloud you derived the model from and identify all the points of significant variance.  The same technology can also be used during a construction project to compare what has been built to what was designed - even when the building is only partially completed.

Ron Singh, Engineering Automation Manager/Chief of Surveys, Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) described progress on his remarkable vision of how automation is upending how we design, build and monitor, operate and maintain U.S. highway systems.  Richard Arrowsmith, Asset Information Group Team Leader, Highways England described the digital model of the English highway system.  Stan Burns, President, Integrated Inventory, who has just retired from Utah DoT, described Utah DoT's comprehensive database of every piece of highway furniture and signage in the Utah highway system.  Together these represent the future of the digitalization of national highway systems.

A new company, Indoor Reality, is the third startup of Dr Avideh Zakhor, who is on leave from the University of California Berkeley.  Her new device is a backpack loaded with sensors including lasers and infrared that enables you to map the interior of buildings by simply walking through a multi-floor building, including up and down stairs.  The resulting data can be used to automatically generate floor plans and 3D models and captures everything you need for an Energy Plus analysis.

Mark Shell and Darrell Gadberry, both of the City of Fort Worth Water Department, described a very versatile device with laser and sonar and camera devices on board that can be used for sewer line inspections of small and large diameter sewer pipes.  Fundamentally this device enables condition-based maintenance of municipal sewer systems.  Mark and Darrell reported that it has saved the Fort Worth Water Department $42 million.

I was able to interview Dr Avideh Zakhor, Nicolas Arnold, Ron Singh, Larry Kleinkemper of Lanmar Services who specialize in creating BIM models for existing buildings, and Greg Bentley of Bentley who has a broad, forward-looking perspective on the "digitalization" of infrastructure.

Crossrail's huge BIM+geospatial model targeted on operations and maintenance

The UK Government as part of its building information modeling (BIM) initiative has said repeatedly that it expects the big payoff of a digital model, estimated at more than 40% savings, will be during operations and maintenance, typically representing 80% of the total cost of a facility.  Companies such as BAM who do Design, Build, Finance and Maintain (DBFM) projects report significant benefits from full lifecycle BIM + geospatial.  But there is little if any quantitative evidence supporting this conjecture.  I have asked people from Finland familiar with the very early BIM developments in that country if there were studies of the benefits of BIM for operations and maintenance, but apparently the BIM focus there has been entirely on design and build.

 

Crossrail with a budget of £14.8 billion is the biggest engineering project in Europe.  It involves 42 km of tunnels beneath one of the most densely populated parts of Europe.  It has wider tunnels  and its 40 stations have longer station platforms than the Tube has.  Crossrail trains are expected to start running next year and the full network should be open by 2019.

 

But the most interesting aspect of the Crossrail project is a 3D digital model with associated asset data that has not only been used during design and construction, but is intended to be used for operations and maintenance.  Crossrail appears to be the first major project that may be able to provide support for the conjecture that the biggest benefits of BIM are for operations and maintenance.

 

The Crossrail model is comprised of spatial and non-spatial data with links between the two.  The spatial data is made up of more than 250,000 3D BIM models as well as as-builts, together comprising a few terabytes. As construction of each facility is completed as-builts are collected by point-cloud survey using laser scanners.  The point clouds captured in the survey are compared to the design and divergences that need resolving are recorded for fixing. The detailed asset data and documentation add an additional 5 terabytes.  This represents one of the World's largest BIM model.  A critical aspect of the spatial database is that all assets are geolocated so that workers can query a particular location of London on a map and then navigate to the Crossrail assets there.

 

The model is intended to become a crucial tool for monitoring, operating and maintaining Crossrail’s systems once the railway is running.  Sensors monitor various aspects of the railway's operation and remote-controlled devices can change operating parameters from a central control room or from a handheld device.  Managers can view this information within the 3D model and can zoom in on an area which needs attention.  Crossrail is testing low-power wireless smart sensors called Utterberries that can monitor strain, temperature, humidity, acceleration, and other aspects of a facility. Utterberries weigh 15 grams and are smart - they have an ARM processor on-board and can operate for more than a year on one charge.  One of the coolest capabilities of the digital infrastrucure is an augmented-reality interface which allows workers to hold an iPad up to a wall or floor and see a view of the infrastructure (electricity, water, and communications) under the floor or behind the wall.

Highlights of GeoBuiz Summit: Intel's indoor positioning chipset

I spent a couple of of very worthwhile days in Washington DC this week attending GeoBuiz Summit.  A top highlight of the sessions was the presentation by Greg Turetzky, Principal Engineer in the GNSS and Location Strategy group at Intel.  Greg described a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices that includes in-chip support for indoor location positioning.

Indoor mapping is already supported by Google and Bing.  Micello is in the business of creating indoor maps of major venues around the world.  Most of the activity seems to be focussed on consumers and locations such as malls, airports and department stores.  A typical indoor application would lead you directly to particular products in a mall or department store.

The major problem that distinguishes indoor from outdoor location and mapping is that there is no widely recognized indoor equivalent of GPS.  When you are outside of buildings on most of the Earth's surface you can use GPS or other GNSS systems  to determine where you, other people and things are.  But as soon as you walk into a building, GPS no longer works.  Tracking people and objects in a building has been one of the major challenges facing the geospatial industry.

There have been many attempts to solve this problem.  Tracking cell phone location using RFID, accelerometers, or installing transmitters with low frequency radio frequency waves that are not as affected by walls as high frequency waves.  The prevalence of WiFi has made possible using Wifi signals from transmitters with known locations to triangulate location.

The business benefit of indoor location is significant because it increases the value of your assets - when you can locate equipment and facilities easily, you will use them more.  In the case of hospitals it can be a matter of life and death to find the "crash cart" in seconds rather than minutes.

The Open Geospatial Consortium's  IndoorGML Standards Working Group has released an IndoorGML Encoding Standard.  IndoorGML has been developed to provide a schema framework for interoperability between indoor spatial applications such as indoor location services, indoor web map services, indoor emergency control, guiding services for visually handicapped persons in indoor space, and indoor robotics.  The IndoorGML standard specifies an open data model and XML schema for indoor spatial information. IndoorGML is an application schema of OGC GML and intentionally focuses on modelling indoor spaces for navigation purposes.

Intel's 8270 chipset, which is based on the 802.11mc standard, is able to provide 2-3 meter accuracy 90% of the time.  Intel's indoor location technology relies on fine time measurement (FTM) which measures the distance between a handheld device and 802.11mc-compliant Wi-Fi access points.  Multilateration is used to compute the device's location.

The chipset is available.  There is a video of the chipset in use.  Intel is encouraging geospatial developers to create mobile apps using the chipset.

INSPIRE-Geospatial World Forum 2015 program released

INSPIRE-Geospatial World Forum 2015, a joint conference organized by the European Commission and Geospatial Media and Communications, has made available its full conference program. Almost 500 presentations are scheduled on topics including building information modelling (BIM), open data, big data analytics, open standards, linked data, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Earth observation, indoor positioning, land information systems for smart cities, urban resilience and sustainability, health, agriculture and others.  Some 2000 delegates are expected to attend from more than 80 countries.  Top sponsors include Trimble, Topcon, ESRI, Digital Globe, Oracle and Bentley.

The theme of the conference is CONVERGENCE: Policies + Practices + Processes via PPP with a focus on improving coordination among policy-makers, technology providers and users.  Including geospatial data and technology in construction, agriculture, health and other industry workflows is an enabler for more successful public–private partnerships (PPP) by facilitating more informed decision making among the stakeholders.

Mobile scanning interiors of buildings with automatic feature extraction for energy performance modeling

At the SPAR International conference Avideh Zakhor from the University of California Berkeley gave an enthralling presentation about her research on capturing optical and thermal point clouds of the insides of buildings using a portable backpack containing a collection of sensors.   Her team has also developed analytical software tools for generating floor plans, distinguishing rooms, identifying staircases, texture mapping surfaces, identifying windows, finding heat sources such as computers and human occupants, identifying lights, and even estimating plug load lower consumption - all automatically. The software her team has developed can generate input in the form of an IDF file for the Department of Energy's EnergyPlus energy performance analysis program. Avideh said that soon it will also be able to generate a gbXML file, which can be consumed by almost all building energy performance analysis software.

Man portable system

 

The "man portable system" her team has developed is a 32 pound backback with a collection of sensors.  There are sensors for accurately tracking the six degrees of spatial freedom which determine the location and orientation of the backpack in addition to sensors for recording optical and thermal point clouds. The operator walks through the building going into all rooms, halls, stairwells and other human accessible spaces. With the backback this is a much faster process than capturing indoor spaces with static laser scanners. For example, Avideh's team was able to scan Union Station in Washington DC in a matter of hours. A comparable static scan takes days.

 

Automated feature extraction

 

The resulting georeferenced data is then offloaded from the backpack and analyzed to generate different 3D data products including optical and thermal 3D point clouds, a colourized 3D point cloud, surface texture map,  and triangulated mesh surfaces.  Two different triangulated surfaces are generated for different applications - a very detailed surface and a much simpler model of spaces and walls. Using these data products the software automates feature extraction. It can distinguish  windows, staircases, and individual rooms and generate a floorplan.  Surface textures can be added to create a 3D photorealtistic rendering.  By analyzing both the optical and thermal point clouds the software tools can identify heat sources including computers and human occupants and can even identify lights and estimate power plug loads.

 

Building energy performance modeling

 

Usi‎ng the results of the automated feature extraction the software tools can be used to generate the input required for a building energy performance audit. Currently the tools are able to generate input in the form of an IDF file for the Department of Energy's Energyplus whole building energy simulation program.   Avideh said that soon it will be possible to generate an gbXML file, which can be consumed by most building energy performance analysis applications including IESVE and Green Building Studio.  This clearly has the potential to convert what is now a slow, manual, expensive process into a fast, repeatable, affordable process.

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

Candidate OGC IndoorGML standard available for public comment

Indoor mapping is already supported by Google and Bing.  Micello is in the business of creating indoor maps of major venues around the world.  Most of the activity seems to be focussed on consumers and locations such as malls, airports and department stores.  A typical indoor application would help you find particular products in a mall or department store.

The major problem that distinguishes indoor from outdoor location and mapping is that there is no widely recognized indoor equivalent of GPS.  When you are outside of buildings on most of the Earth's surface you can use GPS  to determine where you, other people and things are.  As soon as you walk into a building, GPS no longer works and it is difficult to automatically track people and objects.  For example, to be able to track a firefighter in a building  that has not been prepared in advance remains a challenge.

There have been a number of attempts to solve this problem.  Wifi signals from transmitters with known locations can be used to triangulate locations to with an accuracy of 10-15 feet.  Other technologies involve tracking cell phone location by triangulation, RFID, accelerometers, or tracking by low frequency radio frequency waves that are not as affected by walls as high frequency waves.

Another challenge is 3D location in tall buildings, translating an elevation in meters or feet to a particular floor and vice versa.

The business benefit of indoor location is significant because it increases the value of your assets - when you can locate equipment and facilities easily, you will use them more.  In the case of hospitals it can be a matter of life and death to find the "crash cart" in seconds rather than minutes.

The Open Geospatial Consortium's  IndoorGML Standards Working Group has released a candidate  IndoorGML Encoding Standard.  The  IndoorGML Encoding Standard has been developed to provide a common schema framework for interoperability between indoor spatial applications such as indoor location services, indoor web map services, indoor emergency control, guiding services for visually handicapped persons in indoor space, and indoor robotics. The IndoorGML Encoding Standard is intended to provide a cross-platform, vendor-neutral way of communicating indoor spatial information. The IndoorGML Standards Working Group worked in collaboration with other standards groups including ISO/TC204 and IEEE Robotics & Automation Society (RAS).

IndoorGML has been implemented as an application schema of the OGC Geographic Markup Language (GML) Version 3.2.1. IndoorGML's set of geometric and semantic data elements intended to be iconsistent with other standards such as the OGC's CityGML standard and buildingSMART's Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs).

IndoorGML specifies conceptual models and XML schemas for

• Geometric and semantic properties of spaces and connectivity
• Navigation context and constraints
• Space subdivisions and types of connectivity between spaces
• Navigation networks (logical and metric) and their relationships

The OGC is requesting public comment for a month ending on March 21, 2014.  You can download the standard here.

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.

The future of national mapping agencies over the next 5-10 years

Since Google Earth's release in June 2005, national mapping agencies and other government organizations involved with geospatial data and technology have been reasessing their role.  At the Geospatial World Forum (GWF) in Amsterdam last year, Paul Cheung of the United Nations Initiative on Global Geospatial Information Management (GGIM) voiced the concern about their role that many national mapping agencies and other government organizations with responsibility for geospatial information have had since the advent of Google Earth, private data companies like Digital Globe, Geoeye, TeleAtlas and Navteq, crowd-sourced geospatial data like OpenStreetMap, and open data policies adopted by many governments around the world.

The UN-GGIM has just published Future trends in geospatial information management: the five to ten year vision.  A number of experts and visionaries across a range of disciplines of the geospatial community including data collection, academics and major users of geospatial information,  the private sector and the crowdsourced/volunteered geographic information  movement were invited
to contribute their views on the emerging trends in the geospatial world. 

Private sector participation

With respect to the private sector the list of contributors includes senior people at Trimble, Hexagon, ESRI, and Digital Globe/GeoEye, but does not include Google, Microsoft, Nokia/Navteq, or TomTom(TeleAtlas).  I also didn't see anyone on the list from OpenStreetMap.  However, Google, Microsoft Bing, and OpenStreetMap are discusssed in the report.

Trends

Given the large number of people contributing to this report, it is not surprising that it includes a comprehensive set of trends that are impacting national mapping and cadastral agencies (NMCAs),  government bodies responsible for the provision of authoritative geospatial information within a country.

• Sensors - the proliferation of low‑cost, network‑enabled sensors in mobile phones, computers, smart meters or cars.
• Big data - estimated at approximately 2.5 exabytes every day, huge volumes of data are expected to increase demand for geospatial technology  to help to make sense of all this data.
• Linked data -  connecting data to other pieces of data on the Web, providing context and adding value to existing data
• Semantic technologies  - the semantic web as been discussed for years, but there are signs within some verticl industries such as construction that something practical may be emerging
• internet of things - a hyper‑connected network of intelligent objects, I have seen estimates of a trillion objects in the near future
• Cloud - infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), software as a
  service (SaaS) and data as a service (DaaS)
• Open‑source - expected to continue to gaim momemntum, already a number of NMCAs have  adopted open‑source solutions into some of their services, OGC reference implementations are open source.
• Open standards - In many ways the geospatial community is an model industry in the development and maintenance of open standards, led and coordinated by OGC in partnership with many organisations
• 3D data - the world is moving from two dimensional (2D) to three dimensional (3D) mapping; many municipalities are developing realistic and intelligent city models including buildings and infrastructure; the report projects that 3D is becoming an intrinsic part of core geospatial data, rather than an add‑on as it is now
• 3D visualization -3D visualization technology much of it arising in the gaming industry makes it possible to convey complex concepts, projects, and analytical results to non-technical folks such as politicians and the general public
• 4D - used widely in the construction industry, for example, linking Primavera to a BIM model helps with construction scheduling, 5D is also being  used; the report also foresees 4D increasing over the coming five to ten years in geographic information systems (GIS), not only to understand change that has already taken place, but to also enable predictive modelling of future trends
• Imagery - forecasts centimeter precision in many areas of the globe, focus is likely to be performance and analytics.
• Mobile mapping - street‑level visual information, points of interest (POI) and attribute data in more detail; especially LiDAR (and oblique imagery) which will facilitate the generation of 3D datasets. [I would add ground penetrating radar (GPR) for mapping underground infrastructure]
• Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - in the civilian sector UAVs are already being used increasingly in a number of sectors
• GNSS - by 2015, there will be over 100 GNSS satellites in orbit. This will enable faster data collection in very challenging environments, with higher accuracy and greater integrity
• Satellite gravimetry - some nations are already taking the step to move away from traditional schemes defined using large‑scale terrestrial observations and base the national vertical reference system on purely gravimetric geoids instead
• Coordinate systems - are becoming more accurately defined as technology and techniques improve; this is critical large scale construction projects, especially in the transportation sector
• Indoor positioning - an emerging frontier, but one that still represents major challenges
• Passive crowdsourcing - anyone with a smart phone, with or without a GPS, is a sensor which is already being used by private companies to derive infirmation about traffic, shopping patterns, and other information; social media make this an even richer source of information
• Active crowdsourcing - OpenStreetMap (OSM) which grew by providing an alternative to an NMCA is the best known example; some NMCAs still find the concept of crowd-sourced data a challenge
• Funding models - funding the collection of geospatial data remains a controversial topic in some countries; one of the major challenges of the next five to ten years for governments will be demonstrating the value pf geospatial data to the national economy as has been done in Australia and New Zealand and as is currrently underway in Canada

Role of governments

Clearly governments have a role in defining policy, for example,  for access to government spatial data such as free and open data or for protecting consumer privacy.

For some vertical industries the report says that "governments will also play a role in many countries in driving, or at least supporting, cross-sector collaboration in areas such as building, construction and public safety, through building information modelling (BIM)..."  This is already occuring in the U.S., U.K., Finland, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Hong Kong, and Singapore, where national governments ara mandating or at least strongly encouraging the adoption of BIM for public projects.  It is being driven primarily by efficiency and reducing the cost of infrastructure.

The report argues that "governments have a key role to play in bringing all actors together to ensure that our future society is a sustainable, location-enabled one, underpinned by the sustainable provision and effective management of reliable and trusted geospatial information." 

The challenge for NMCAs in the area of traditional mapping is that in parts of the world, Google. Bing, OpenStreetMaps (see here to compare these data sources), or a local crowd-sourced alternative like Malsingmaps provides more comprehensive, accurate, current and accessible data with less restrictive licensing and at a lower cost than the NMCA.  There are those who argue that in the area of traditional mapping, private and crowd-sourced organizations do a better job at lower cost and that government needs to find a new area of focus where it can provide a service that it would be difficult for anyone else to provide.  Examples are managing authorative data such as the parcel fabric or  mapping undeveloped areas such as Northern Canada or the Amazon interior that may be uneconomic for a commercial concern.

Infrastructure Mapping

An area where government may be uniquely qualified is mapping national infrastructure, much of which has a national security dimension.  In many parts of the world the location of underground infrastructure including electric power, water and wastewater, gas, district heating, and other networks is unknown or poorly known. 

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.

In the U.S. access to infrastructure data including location is restricted under Protected Critical Infrastructure Information (PCII) Program. In addition utilties, telecommunications and other organizations responsible for operating infrastructure networks are very often reluctant to share information about their networks for competitive and other reasons.  There are successful examples around the world where government has helped enable a shared ulility network database.

The Victorian Spatial Council has developed a framework for sharing based on licenses and metadata, not only within the Government of Victoria, but also among utilities, telecommunications firms, National Government, local governments, quasi-government, and non-government organizations.

As a practical example, the City of Las Vegas has successfully completed a pilot to develope a 3D model of the City's underground and aboveground infrastructure and is expanding the project to cover more of the City.

There is a growing body of information that indicates that the return on investment (ROI) for investing in accurately geolocating underground infrastructure is positive and substantial.  A pilot in northern Italy estimated a ROI of €16 for every € invested in improving the reliability information about underground infrastructure.  For comparison the ROI for investing in improving information about underground infrastructure in the United States has been estimated to range from $3 to $21 for every dollar invested.