Between the Poles

Automated feature recognition helps democratize utility mapping for producing infrastructure digital twins

In jurisdictions worldwide the low quality of underground location data has been identified as a top cause of underground utility damage. Existing underground utility data, most of which is stored in network owners' records, is often inaccurate, out of date or simply missing.  In North America in a survey of 402 locate professionals better facility maps received nearly unanimous agreement as a top strategy for improving the efficiency and quality of locates.  Singapore's Digital Underground project is unequivocal about the economic and social impact of low quality underground location data stating that "virtually all stakeholders are aware that much of the available information is unreliable and that this has repeatedly led to losses of time, money and opportunities."

Challenges facing the utility mapping industry

The root cause of the low quality of underground utility data is how utility mapping is structured as an industry. The primary activities of the utility mapping industry are data collection and how we keep and share this data with other parties.

Data collection

The way we collect is slowly changing, but predominantly we're still using traditional survey and locate methods. The survey methodology we are using hasn't changed in a hundred years. It's a very time and materials based, manual and analog process. Survey processes are slow and expensive to execute and require specialized equipment and skill sets, and safety is a big concern.

Locating underground utilities is one of the biggest causes of delays in construction schedules, service disruptions are a common occurrence, safety is always a major concern. and locate operations are slow to execute. Accuracy and timeliness are major issues. Locate operations require specialized equipment and skill sets which restricts locators to a small number of industry insiders.  A major shortfall is that underground utility location data is rarely available during the crucial planning and design stages of civil engineering projects.

Democratization of utility mapping

The utility mapping industry needs some fundamental changes. We need to move away from the monopoly that exists right now. There is just a handful of companies that are able to go out and collect underground utility data. We need to democratize data collection so that many more people can collect this data, targeting a crowd sourced approach and enabling multiple creators or collectors providing this data. This distributes the responsibility for the data as well. The more distributed the responsibilities, the lower risk and the lower the cost of failures will be.

We also need to change the skill level required. With current technology, we should be able to automate much of routine locating and thus enable many more people to do it. Using inexpensive technology will lower the cost of collecting and aggregating locate data. As data becomes lower cost to capture, data retention will become less expensive which will encourage people to retain the location data they acquire rather than simply painting/marking the ground and not capturing the data digitally.

Democratization is the real future of 3D infrastructure mapping. Right now data is still very siloed. We'll always have the traditional mapping companies, survey companies, line locating companies and asset owners going out and collecting their own data. But through crowdsourcing data from routine day to day locating and mapping, infrastructure projects, and other sources, aggregating that data and distributing access to that data is how utility mapping will really come to the forefront.  It should be easy to upload data into a central register where it can be made accessible to multiple stakeholders. Compliance with Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards provides a basis for full interoperability enabling open access to every single conduit, cable, pipe, or other piece of infrastructure in real time from your phone, your tablet, your laptop or other applications.

Infrastructure digital twin

We think the best paradigm for producing and capturing asset data is through collecting it into an infrastructure digital twin. Digital twins have made a lot of progress in a variety of industries. Most importantly, for the utility mapping industry, it should be noted that creating a digital twin is much easier than it was even just a few years ago. We think the time is right for an infrastructure digital twin and it can be just at the asset level for one particular company, but we believe it should be at a regional level. Cities, municipalities and regional governments around the world are beginning to develop comprehensive digital twins of all of their physical infrastructure; buildings, roads, trees, power lines, and subsurface utilities and they're pouring resources into it.

And we think that Canada and the United States should start doing the same thing. And for us in the utility industry, data collection costs are lower than they ever have been. There's clearly interest among stakeholders and governments to start dealing with infrastructure and utility mapping problems, particularly to lower the number and costs of strikes, injuries and the loss of life. We now know a lot more about how to create data from other data sets, using different types of analysis and artificial intelligence to piece disparate data sets together. Using AI machine learning in the cloud is much less inexpensive compared to just a few years ago. And nowadays one of the things that makes infrastructure digital twins readily accessible to the utility industry is the fact that storing huge volumes of data in the cloud has become very inexpensive.

What is infrastructure digital twin ? First of all, a digital twin needs to result in effective action. It's not just enough say we have a digital twin philosophy The purpose of having a digital twin is to result in effective action that improves your business. It needs to use real time and historical data, which is paramount for us in the utility mapping industry, and it's going to be motivated by outcomes. For us in the utility industry, it is to reduce and even eliminate utility strikes during construction and the associated risks of injuries and fatalities.

The infrastructure digital twin has to be stored and managed in a relational database so it can be queried, analyzed and improved on through time, and related to other data sets. Processes for collecting data and maintaining data must be simple so that we can break the barrier of restricting underground utility mapping to a specialized group of people. If we truly want to democratize and compile data from disparate data sets, we need very simple processes to get data into the database, analyzed and maintained.

An infrastructure digital twin should be captured and maintained in 3D, even though most utilities in the ground are within just a couple of meters of the top of the ground. The 3D component is vital, because part of analyzing a data set is that much ancillary data is 3D such as overhead power lines that come down the side of a pole into conduits below the ground,

Imagery that's taken looking straight down at the ground, like traditional satellite imagery, can be visualized on a map and incorporated directly into a GIS database. But other types of imagery such as oblique, 360-degree, street-side, and inspection imagery need to be treated differently.  Oriented Imagery has a range of possible applications. For example, a construction company might use it to review asset inventory photos taken by field workers at a construction site. A telecom company or electric utility would use it to examine close range inspection images of electrical and telecom towers from many different angles. Oriented imagery applications enable you to see exactly where the image is on the map as you pan or zoom in the image. There are spatial navigation tools designed to work specifically with oriented imagery. You can query oriented images using spatial and temporal filters.

Finally, it is very important to have standardized formats, including storage formats and cloud formats.  It improves our ability to inexpensively use machine learning to do associative analyses of disparate data sets to make a larger, more conflated data sets.

Automated feature extraction

Maintaining accurate, up-to-date, comprehensive data about assets, above ground and below ground, has been a challenge for utilities for decades. Now new technologies including machine learning are being applied to automate real-time maintenance of utility network information and provide a foundation for infrastructure digital twins.

Automated feature extraction has advanced dramatically in the last few years.  This is an example where high density LiDAR and ultra high resolution imagery was used on a very low, very small diameter gas distribution install from an open trench. You can clearly see the ease with which the LiDAR produces a 3D representation of all of the local utility infrastructure.

Much of the the advancement in in automated 3D mapping have derived from the autonomous vehicle industry which have trickled down to other parts of the GIS industry.  The hardware and software are vastly easier to use and produce vastly better data. You can see from these ortho images collected from our system and the LiDAR overlaid on it. Feature extraction was used to automatically define top of pipe, top of ditch and actual joints in the pipe. Automated classification of LiDAR removes the need for someone to go out there with a Pogo stick and find the top of pipe. It makes it possible to simply drive alongside and scan with a mobile LiDAR system an open trench containing a newly installed pipe to produce a detailed 3D model with centimetre accuracy without having a person present. It is much safer - no boots on the pavement - and it drastically reduces the cost.

We prefer mobile mapping systems as opposed to handhelds because mobile mapping systems produce a tremendous amount more data and its registration tends to be vastly superior. It is much safer because it eliminates a need for someone to get out of a vehicle - so no boots on the pavement. Anytime you're still getting out, whether you're using handhold laser handhold mapping system, or a Pogo stick, you still have a person outside the vehicle walking around a street. With a mobile system you eliminate that risk, and you also drastically decrease the time required to do the collection. Here is another example where automated feature extraction was used to identify the electro fused coupling. You can see the butt joints, you can see the Ts and so forth. All this can be done very simply now with automated feature extraction.

Data registers

While surveyors may have had experience with a provincial or other types of survey register, utility location data identified during routine locate (one call) operations in general is only used to mark the ground and is rarely recorded, digitally or otherwise. Practically this means locators going back to the same location they were at just a few weeks ago to repeat the locate operation for another project. People in the locate industry are very familiar with this and the  amount of schedule and cost expense it causes. Exposing people to relocate or remap an area that was just done not too long ago is doubling their risk. Secondly, because the data is not retained or kept in easily accessible ways, we can't analyze it.  For example, we might want to confirm that we have correctly identified the type of utility, the accuracy of its location, or determine if there have been changes in its location, type, or current status since we last detected it. And because the data is not being retained and centrally managed at a global level or at a large scale level, there's no real opportunity for organic data enhancements or improvements.

The CGA Next Practices Report to Industry has made the case that a comprehensive national GIS map of buried infrastructure is among the opportunities for systemic improvement with the greatest ROI for industry. The benefits of a national register are greater safety, enhanced construction efficiency; reduced design, construction, and maintenance costs; greater regulatory compliance; improved locate efficiency; fewer project delays and budget overruns; fewer service disruptions to the public, less traffic disruptions and loss of custom and other inconveniences for the public.

Sharing maps of underground infrastructure is not totally new to Canada. For example, the City of Calgary's Joint Utility Mapping Project (JUMP) system, the ICI Society in British Columbia, the City of Toronto's Digital Map Owners Group (DMOG) and others have been sharing underground utility information for years.

The Canadian Underground Infrastructure Register (CUIR) is a new national initiative started at the beginning of the year. The CUIR initiative is intended to enhance current practices in a way that enables all stakeholder groups to benefit from the initiative; construction contractors, network owners, government transportation agencies, design engineers, subsurface utility engineering (SUE) engineers, surveyors, locators, workers in the field and the public. The CUIR initiative has been inspired by the National Underground Asset Register (NUAR) project currently being implemented in the UK. The objective of NUAR is to develop a register of location data for all underground infrastructure in England, Wales and Northern Ireland that is accessible to all network owners and government agencies.

This post is based on Joseph Hlady's (Lux Modus) talk at Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF).

An infrastructure digital twin provides a dynamic environment for managing underground assets of a multi-utility campus

For organizations managing a campus such as educational facilities, healthcare facilities, commercial real estate, utilities, and municipalities managing public works, storm sewer systems, and parks which are characterized by having many different utilities and and other infrastructure, an infrastructure digital twin provides owners, operators and third-parties with a streamlined, cloud-based solution that maps, manages and shares a wide range of subsurface and above ground assets, including fibre, pipes, electric power cables, lighting, conduits, and other structures enabling campus asset owners to not only track their assets but to provide all the information about their assets; their history, their replacement cost and their current cost without which you cannot justify your financial demands, be it a budget request for next year or a bid bond for a major project.

Infrastructure digital twin

A major challenge for legacy asset management systems is that documents are hard to access. Problems in the field are hard to identify because it takes too long to access the relevant documents and other information in the field. It's hard to share architecture and utility drawings with contractors and other stakeholders. People are really copying large blueprints or as-builts and delivering a set of documents to a new contractor who's just been onboarded and the contractor has to spend weeks studying these documents and comparing this information to what's there, what's underground, what's above ground and matching it together.

The way we address this challenge is by creating an infrastructure digital twin which provides accessible information to all stakeholders through a subscription service. A full digital twin of your campus, is a big, costly project, but an infrastructure digital twin is simpler and much faster. It involves site verification and infrastructure mapping as a service including drone imaging, site surveying, walking the campus and verifying objects. If the customer is using some type of infrastructure detection, the accurate information from that system plugs into our system, so it remains live. We support Open Geospatial Consortium standards to ensure interoperability. We onboard all of the data and we do that for any new updates on the campus. If something is wrong in the map and it's not in the site, or in site and not in the map, or if the drone gave us a better accuracy, we detect that and make corrections. For example, customers often hire utility engineering firms to conduct subsurface utility surveys (SUE).  We load that information and match it with everything we have in the system about their underground and other assets. Full onboarding requires 40 days or less. And more importantly, all the data is owned by the client all the time.

We've loaded over four million assets for our customers. Those assets are being used by thousands of users, including facilities, teams, construction managers, engineering and architecture firms, local utilities, fire departments and others.

You can share data immediately with anyone you want. And there are no limits on the number of users in any of our systems. If you onboard a new construction company for a new project, you just provide them with a login, specify what they can access and see, and they are onboard.

Dynamic view of your assets

The system provides a dynamic view of all your assets. It's not a static image, GIS or CAD files which you update every several months. It's real time, live presentation of information coming from a database and it is integrated with all your other systems. You can drill down on every single conduit, cable, pipe, or other piece of infrastructure and query all its attributes and see the sources of the data. You have access to the data in real time from your phone, your tablet, or your laptop because it is a fully cloud solution. We are able to do that because we are compliant with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and follow OGC standards. We are using open systems in terms of representing all the attributes about every item.  For a typical campus environment, ranging from a few blocks to a college campus or hospital complex, for example, you may have 20,000 assets. All of those assets and their associated attributes are captured and live in that database. We're building IOT integration, so you will have real time data on top of their various asset layers. You can see the water flow and the temperature and the pressure from the sensors. To go back to the updates. We are building integration with augmented reality. so that all underground assets can be visualized in 3D AR.

We provide a dynamic way of having base maps. You can use Google Maps, Esri World Imagery, or OpenStreetMap or even a mix of these. You can add your own imagery. 

In addition to the dynamic view of the locations and attributes of all your assets, you also have a plan room. All your documents are there, your engineering drawings, as-builts, survey and SUE reports, legacy maps, and other sources of underground data. You can search them by date or by the contractor or surveyor who supplied this data to you. These documents are accessible to you at any time from any device.

Managing asset budgeting

More importantly, the system provides an executive summary of all your assets. For example, in this site, which we have built as an example (we cannot share real data publicly) we have included about $4 million worth of assets. FM people need to deliver projects on time, minimize disruption of services to those people who are using these facilities, and improve the sustainability of their facilities. To do this requires that you can justify your CAPEX and OPEX budget. For some capital projects, you might be able to look at the total cost for adding a new building. But for budgets for operations and maintenance, retrofitting a fiber network, changing your irrigation network, it's really difficult to do that without having access to everything about your assets, their history, their replacement cost and their current cost. Without this information you cannot justify your financial demands, be it a budget request for next year or a bid bond for a major project.

The key to managing budgets is by replacement costs. If you want to replace your electric network, you need to know how you built the electric network in the first place. The database provides access to all this information. You can break your assets down by type of structure; electric power, conduits, lighting, water, wastewater and gas pipe networks. You can see their life expectancy, aggregate them based on their expected time of expiry and then decide on remedial action. You also need to worry about the impact of potential accidents and most importantly your liabilities. If a major underground gas line is damaged, then you might face heavy liabilities because it might interrupt gas service not just to your campus but for the entire area or even an entire municipality.

Our system has an ROI calculator so you can compute your potential savings. This has helped customers secure grants because they were able to compute the information needed to submit a bid bond.

Conclusion

An infrastructure digital twin provides immediately accessible information to all your assets for all stakeholders through a subscription service. It's a real time, live presentation of information coming from a database and it is integrated with all your other systems. For critical budgeting operations and maintenance, you have immediate access to everything about your assets; their history, their replacement cost and their current cost that enables you to justify your financial demands, be it a budget request for next year or a bid bond for a major project.

This post is based on Moufid Charafeddine's (BetterGIS) talk at Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF).

Streamlining connectivity for all with open, decentralized data

Guest post by Wade Anderson, Vice President, SMB, IQGeo

5G is predicted to have the same economic impact on the US as commercializing the internet did 25 years ago. The technology is the motor of a new data economy built around artificial intelligence, autonomy, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things. 5G is essential to produce and transport data and new knowledge faster and more seamlessly to support an increasingly digital and interconnected economy. The proliferation of IoT applications across industries is showing no signs of slowing down, presenting a huge opportunity for business growth. According to GSMA, the global IoT market will be worth $900 billion in revenue by 2025 – an almost threefold increase on 2019.

With global 5G adoption expected to almost triple in 2021, the distribution of telecoms networks will need to grow to match this projected demand. The US has ambitious plans to achieve nationwide 5G coverage through a combination of state incentives and market forces. The Biden administration pledged $100bn to improve broadband infrastructure across the nation, with the ultimate aim of providing high-speed broadband connectivity for all Americans by 2029. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, ensuring connectivity for all has risen further up the agenda for the telecoms industry and for municipalities, government agencies, universities and corporates that support their own fiber and 5G networks.

Major US telecoms providers are deploying superfast Ultra-Wideband 5G services across cities, stadia, and airports. The US is also ahead of many other advanced countries in allocating high-band and low-band spectra for 5G. North America has the world’s largest share of the market in ‘dark fiber’, unused additional capacity that could help share and spread 5G coverage. Yet the breadth of coverage is patchy and inconsistent and lags behind competitors such as South Korea and China. There has been growing frustration with the pace of the rollout across much of the US. There are also concerns over the lack of market diversity and the limited number of vendors following the US ban on Huawei. There remain major challenges in filling gaps in provision, particularly in remote and rural areas where major new infrastructure investment from large providers is unviable. Currently, it is estimated that over a third of Americans living in rural areas lack access to a quality standard of broadband.

Yet the expansion of high-speed broadband to all states and regions is essential to ensure equality of connectivity. To reach rural or small-town locations we cannot rely solely on major telecoms operators but need a diverse market of innovative providers, Wireless Internet service providers (WISPs), and organizations such as transport, governmental, and commercial operators willing to lease out bandwidth. These smaller providers can help complement large networks to reach under-served areas that may not be commercially viable for major infrastructure investment.

Tackling information silos to accelerate rollout

A major challenge that organizations continue to face is the existence of information silos which prevent organizations from planning the most efficient and effective paths to new markets and wider coverage. There is often a lack of structured network documentation as many smaller operators have not implemented a System of Record (SoR) which identifies an authoritative data source for each data element. In addition, there continue to be silos between workflows such as maintenance and construction and between datasets such as geospatial data and data such as asset records, repairs, or upgrades. Providers need to be able to integrate everything from meteorological to economic data with internal processes and workflows to spot new hazards or opportunities.

For example, data from the nearby natural or built environment, such as trees that could obstruct signals or tall buildings that could host 5G antennae, is crucial to maintenance schedules and planning new provision. Similarly, integrating accurate geospatial information on existing networks with data on nearby infrastructure would help organizations identify opportunities to lease out ‘dark fiber’ to others, thereby organically increasing nationwide 5G networks. Open, decentralized internal data is critical to speed up the deployment of 5G and foster a healthy, competitive culture across the industry. A diverse, dynamic telecoms market able to collectively achieve nationwide coverage will require more open and dynamic telecoms data.

To facilitate more agile broadband infrastructure planning, organizations must develop system of record (SoR) strategies and break down internal silos by encouraging efficient and joined-up data sharing. Operators should make their internal geospatial network data accessible to all departments so they can seamlessly incorporate external data such as street maps or satellite data into all their survey, construction, and maintenance processes. Geospatial network data forms a ‘digital thread’ connecting all external data to a specific location in the network and thus revealing the subtle interdependencies between networks and their local environment.

Opening up their internal systems so that disparate departments and divisions can seamlessly incorporate relevant external data into all processes. For example, IBM Weather Group’s LIDAR and satellite data on vegetation cover could be overlaid onto geospatial network data to help companies plan new 5G antennae to minimize signal obstruction from nearby vegetation. Similar organizations could open their datasets to telecoms companies to help create a complete picture of the hazards and opportunities to network expansion. By integrating external data with internal network information, new market entrants could see opportunities for efficient deployment of broadband into new geographies and accelerate the process of ensuring nationwide coverage.

A flow of telecoms data between departments enables open, decentralized information sharing. Open-source, geospatial data supports smaller and larger telecoms players to maximize the reach of high-speed broadband, addressing the growing digital divide of nationwide connectivity.

The ‘dark fiber’ opportunity

Accurate, real-time geospatial data can also help organizations spot opportunities to lease out bandwidth. Many organizations are sitting on goldmines of unused, ‘dark fiber’ network capacity that could be sold to companies or leased to nearby communities to increase coverage. We helped a large university in the western US audit and update their network asset records and uncovered over 200 underutilized ‘dark’ broadband fibers, helping streamline their network and identify extra capacity. They also used advanced geospatial information systems to predict future capacity and find the most efficient pathways to coverage across their campus.

The same data could be shared with telecoms operators or other organizations to help plot the most effective paths to extend coverage using existing capacity. North America already leads the world in the ‘dark fiber’ networks market and has an opportunity to leverage this to accelerate the nationwide 5G coverage without new infrastructure spending. Discovering unused extra broadband capacity in this way helps to increase efficiency for large and small operators alike by allowing them to extract maximum coverage from minimal resources and grow revenue potential in the process.

Other companies are digitalizing and decentralizing their network data and making it accessible to everyone from field technicians to call-centre staff. These companies are moving away from traditional centralized GIS, siloed spreadsheets, proprietary apps, or paper maps towards ‘open’ network data that can be accessed from smartphones and tablets or exported through open APIs. This means that data on current networks can be easily merged with other datasets to spot opportunities to maximize coverage with minimal resources and risk.

Achieving nationwide 5G coverage and the digital transformation of the economy will require a parallel digital transformation of telecoms, fiber and 5G operators. Companies will need to embrace an open, transparent approach to capturing and sharing data while creating the ability to capture and integrate data from across all departments and external sources to develop a holistic picture of the risks and rewards across every region. This new digital transformation will demand the democratization and decentralization of all organizational data so that every operator can see the clearest and quickest route to reaching under-served communities across the country.

Making Landsat data free and open generated billions of dollars of economic benefits

Open data has been gathering momentum among governments. First enunciated in the United States, the principle that citizens should not be required to pay twice for government data, free and open access to government geospatial data has been adopted by many governments including US Federal, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, California state and counties, and by the City of Vancouver and other cities.  In 2013 G8 leaders (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union) signed a charter on open data.  The Ordnance Survey in the UK began releasing some of its data with open licensing as part of its OpenData initiative in 2010, but it wasn't until 2018 that the OS Mastermap was made openly available for the public and businesses to use. But being able to access prepared maps and other derived material is just a first step, governments need to provide access to raw geospatial data in commonly used Web-friendly formats. In the U.S. Data.gov was launched in late 2009.  In 2013, President Obama issued an Executive Order making open and machine readable the new default for federal government information in the United States.

A key transition occurred in 2008 when the U.S. Geological Survey announced a policy of open data. Prior to this Landsat images were made available on a cost recovery basis, costing hundreds to thousands of dollars per scene. But in January 2008 Barbara Ryan, the Associate Director for Geography at the U.S. Geological Survey, and Michael Freilich, NASA’s Director of the Earth Science Division, signed off on a Landsat Data Distribution Policy that made Landsat images free to the public. The USGS announced the free-and-open data policy on April 21, 2008. In a recent talk at the Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure Summit Barbara Ryan described the impact of that decision. Landsat downloads jumped from 53 scenes per day to 5,700 scenes per day. The economic benefit derived from the Landsat data was estimated at US $1.7 billion domestically, $400 million internationally for a global total of $2.1 billion In 2011.

Should underground infrastructure location data be included in digital twins ?

There are fundamental differences between above- and below-ground data which may limit the usefulness of underground data in digital twins.  For location data about the underground there are often data quality issues, legal restrictions on sharing privately held data, and potential liabilities that can place limits on how this data can be used. 

At the GEOBIM 2020 conference many of the presentations discussed developing digital twins of cities (Rotterdam, Helsinki, Pilsen, Athens), regions (Flanders), and even nations (Estonia, Singapore, UK).  Many cities have 3D models of their above-ground infrastructure including buildings, transportation networks, parks, and other infrastructure typically captured in 2D or 3D imagery from overflights or in 2D GIS maps. But underground infrastructure is often neglected, even though it is recognized that water and wastewater, energy (gas, electric power, and district heating),  and communications (fibre and copper) networks provide the life blood of the city.

It may be simply out-of-sight out-of-mind, but there is also a fundamental difference in what jurisidictions are able to do with representations of above and below ground infrastructure. Above ground, whatever can be photographed or scanned in the public space; from the street, from an airplane or drone, or from a satellite, in 2D or 3D, is generally unrestricted in application.  It is necessary to remove recognizable people and vehicles for privacy reasons and there may be national security restrictions, but in general this data can be used without restruction to create an open, publicly available digital model or digital twin.  The accuracy of the above-ground data in digital twins is generally high - for digitally scanned data accuracy even reaches the mm level.  And because this is open data, provided "as is", liability does not appear to have become an issue.

Underground the situation is different.  First of all, privately owned property is generally off limits. For example, pipes and cables running on private property and connecting homes and business to the municipal water, gas, power, and telecom services are normally missing in digital city models. Secondly, in most jurisdictions some or all of the utility and telecom infrastructure in the public right-of-way is privately owned.  There is a range in how much of the infrastructure in the public right-of-way is publicly owned and how much is private.  Many cities own water and sewer services and this data is often open and publicly accessible. But electric power, gas, and telecom are typically privately owned.  Private ownership, especially in the case of a competitive market such as telecom, imposes a fundamental restriction on public access to this data in the context of an open digital twin. 

For example, the City of Rotterdam is proud that its digital twin is open and accessible to the public and that it includes above and below ground infrastructure.  But, as Roland van der Heijden explained at GEOBIM, while about 2/3 of the underground utility data is open and accessible, there are restrictions on the other 1/3 because these represent privately owned facilities. 

Helsinki is one of the early adopters of the digital twin concept and actually has two models, one derived from imagery and intended for visualization applications.  The other is a semantic digital twin based on the CityGML data model which has extensions for utilities.  In his GEOBIM talk Jarmo Suomisto made it clear that the city has no plans to include location data about underground infrastructure. Jarmo gave several reasons for this decision all of which are important issues that in general apply in any municipal, regional or national jurisdiction. In Helsinki location data for underground utilities is owned and maintained by private utility and telecom owners.  Access to this data requires a data sharing agreement between the city and the network operators.  Furthermore, there are questions about whether the quality of the utility location data (completeness, accuracy and currency) is up the city's standard for its digital twin. Finally, there is the major issue of liabilities.  Who is responsible if someone, say a construction contractor, uses this data and hits an underground utility, the city, the network operator or the contractor ?

In Estonia, the situation is different. National legislation requires that all utility network owners with infrastructure in the public right of way or under land publicly owned provide their data to the national registry. The legislation does not apply to small private owners (private houses on private land). Furthermore, when changes are made to the network, either installing new infrastructure or renovating old infrastructure, the data provided to the national registry needs to be refreshed.  Even more interesting, when during excavation it is discovered that the location of network infrastructure is incorrect, it is required that the registry be updated with the corrected information.

Slovenia has a process with similarities to the Estonian system.  Network operators are required to submit location data for underground infrastructure to the Geodetic Administration of the Republic of Slovenia (GURS) which maintains open, publicly accessible databases of underground utility and telecom infrastructure, parcel files and other data.  In the case of telecom network operators are subject to civil penalties if it is found that in some area they have not provided records of the location of their underground cables.  For this and other reasons the quality of the underground data has been improving and it is expected that within a couple of years, excavators will be able to rely on the public database instead of having to contact network operators directly for records of the infrastructure in the area of  a planned excavation.

An important question for any data included in a digital twin is fitness-for-purpose.  The most common use case for city digital twins is planning.  Other common use cases include noise abatement, wind and heat control, zoning compliance, permitting and right-to-light.  Each use case has specific data requirements. Many don't require survey-grade accuracy in location, it may only be necessary to refresh the data once or twice a year, and the level of detail may be low.  For underground utilities the OGC MUDDI underground standards project has identified several uses cases for information about the location of underground infrastructure; routine street excavations, emergency response, utility maintenance programs, large scale construction projects, disaster planning and response, and smart cities programs. Each has different requirements for access, data quality, currency and level of detail.

The only instance I know of in North America of a province or state wide database that includes maps of most utility infrastructure is the Integrated Cadastral Information Society (ICIS) in British Columbia. ICIS maintains a database of geospatial data including cadastral and parcel map for the province, civic address registry, assessment data, utility infrastructure data contributed and maintained by major utility organizations operating in BC, and local government infrastructure data, including sewer, storm and water mains. ICIS is a non-governmental and non-profit organization that is supported entirely by its members including telecommunications and utility companies, local governments, First Nations, the Provincial Government, Federal Government departments, and private surveying companies.ICIS data is used for efficient communication between utilities, safe operations and emergency response, optimized infrastructure planning and operational service delivery, and shared spatial reference data for engineering and survey work. Data contributed by members may be refreshed one or twice a year.  But the requirements of one call legislation are very specific and damage prevention during excavation is not a use case directly supported by ICIS.  And this is even though British Columbia is the only jurisdiction in North America that I know of where network operators can opt to provide plans (paper or digital) of their underground services in response to one call requests. In fact, the last time I checked there was no relationship between ICIS and British Columbia One Call (BC1C).

The key question for jurisdictions developing digital twins and considering including the underground is for which use cases is underground infrastructure data with its current limitations - restricted access and incomplete, inaccurate and out-of-date data - fit-for-purpose ?  For Helsinki it appears that there are no compelling use cases for underground data in its current state. While for other jurisdictions such as Rotterdam, Estonia and Slovenia there are sufficiently compelling reasons for including underground data in a digital twin.

Above and underground infrastructure comprise Rotterdam's open digital twin

The City of Rotterdam is developing a digital twin of the city.  3D vector and image data of the above- and underground infrastructure, zoning regulations and city by-laws, data streams from real-time sensors, applications and simulations will comprise Rotterdam's digital twin. It is envisaged that the digital twin will enable the city to assess the impact of proposed changes in bylaws and regulations by simulating them before they are implemented. Rotterdam, and in fact the whole of the Netherlands have adopted transparency and open data as a pillar of government and are basing 3D models on open national and international standards, intend for the 3D data to be open and accessible to the public, and intend to use open source software wherever possible.

Many cities have 3D models of their aboveground infrastructure; buildings, transportation networks, parks, and other infrastructure typically captured in 2D or 3D imagery from overflights or in 2D GIS maps.  Imagery is not very smart and extracting 3D vector objects such as building footprints, heights, profiles and transportation networks requires sophisticated post-processing.  Even more importantly, underground infrastructure is usually neglected, even though it is recognized that water and wastewater, energy (gas, electric power, and district heating),  and communications (fibre and copper) networks provide the life blood of the city.

Rotterdam has been developing its 3D model, which underpins the digital twin, for several years.  Currently it contains street furniture such as street lights, trees and underground parts of street furniture, a large scale basemap, a complete map of underground networks of cables and pipes, buildings, and non-physical content such as zoning regulations and  bylaws.  The 3D model is kept in sync with data repositories maintained by city departments and others.  In the future it will also include real-time data streams from a variety of sensors. 

The 3D model is open, based on open standards and many of the applications that have been developed for it are open source projects. For example, visualizations rely on Cesium, an open source initiative which has just announced support for visualizing underground utilities, mines, and geological layers. The rationale for the data being based on open standards is that an standards-based environment creates an open data commons where developers can devote their time to developing innovative applications rather than spending time converting data from one format to another.

The Dutch 3D standard is an integration of CityGML Application Domain Extension (ADE) and the existing national IMGeo standard for large-scale representations of roads, water bodies, and land use. The Dutch Kadaster, Geonovum, the Netherlands Geodetic Commission and the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Environment initiated a "3D Pilot NL" to develop a national 3D standard.  Existing intnernational standards including CityGML(Open Geospatial Consortium), IFC (buildingSMART), and others were investigated. The findings of the pilot  resulted in a national 3D standard implemented as a CityGML Application Domain Extension (ADE) that integrates the latest version of the existing Dutch national standard IMGeo 2.0. 

Current applications (virtualcitySYSTEMS, ESRI, IMAGEM and Unity) use the 3D model as input for analytics and visualization. One can imagine many use cases for the data in the Rotterdam 3D model. Among these three use cases have been identified as low-hanging fruit; climate adaptation, viewsheds and energy performance of buildings. 

Much of Rotterdam is below sea level and managing rain water accumulation during heavy rainfalls is a major issue. which affects building basements, subway entrances, low-lying roads, electrical transformers, and other infrastructure.  To address this problem, the concept of "water squares" has been developed and the 3D model used to determine the optimum location for these..  Water squares are open areas where water can safely be allowed to accumulate during heavy rainfalls to avoid overstressing storm sewers. 

In another application of the 3D model data, building data can be filtered and streamed to energy performance applications that provide insights into how buildings perform.

Open standards and open data also enables the sharing of data among cities in the Netherlands.  The Dutch Kadaster has developed an open 3D map of the whole of the Netherlands, with scales ranging from 1:500 to 1:25,000 in collaboration with academic, private sector, and public sector partners.  All data in the 3D map is built on the basis of open standards.  The map was created by combining existing 2D data with the Elevation Model of the Netherlands resulting from a LiDAR survey which covers the whole of the Netherlands with a resolution of eight elevation points per square meter.

Open data and open standards also relate to a critical issue that is of growing importance. Many governments have adopted transparency and open data as a cornerstone of democratic policy.  But often digital twins for smart cities are being developed by private-sector firms or by public-private initiatives.  As William Davies points out in Nervous States, "the IT infrastructure used to build e-geovernment projects or "smart cities" comes from the commercial sector, and the companies that provide it often retain control over the data that results." 

For example, recently a joint Alphabet/Google/Sidewalk Labs and City of Toronto initiative to develop a smart city on Toronto's waterfront foundered and was cancelled.  One of the reasons, it is argued, is that a technology giant such as Google (or Facebook, Amazon, ...) is not a vendor in the traditional sense, but a "surveillance capitalist" that collects and analyzes behavioural data captured from users for its own economic imperatives.  In the context of a smart city the opportunities for data collection from citizens and from systems such as water and wastewater, transit, waste removal, traffic management, and others are immense.  If this data is appropriated and becomes proprietary, it puts a private entity in a position to supplant democratic government, which doesn't have access to this huge volume of data and the analytics which extracts information from it.  Relying on open standards and ensuring that data is open and accessible to the public are essential to avoid citizens' and municipal data becoming proprietary.  Furthermore, using open source software and, I would add, open training data for machine learning applications helps avoid the problem of the analytics also becoming proprietary.

Based on a Webinar by Christian Veldhuis, Advisor City of Rotterdam, Rick Klooster, CCO, FUTURE INSIGHT and Antje Kunze, Director Sales & Marketing, virtualcitySYSTEMS.

Scotland's system for sharing location information about underground infrastructure to be mandatory

Scotland is one of the leading jurisdictions in developing a nation-wide collaborative system for sharing information about the location of underground infrastructure among stakeholders involved in road construction including roads authorities, utility and telecom network operators, and Transport Scotland. The Scottish Vault system was implemented by the Scottish road works community on a voluntary basis in 2012 and will soon become mandatory. There is a dial before you dig system in Scotland, but it is being used less and less as network operators and roads authorities are switching to the Vault system.

Background

Underground utilities and other infrastructure are a major cause of highway construction schedule and budget overruns. In addition to construction delays, damage to underground utilities during construction makes every construction project a potential disaster site with risk for workers and the public. Every year, in excess of four million holes are dug in UK roads to repair assets, provide connecting services to new premises and to lay new cables and pipes. Failure to identify accurately the location of existing buried assets results in numerous practical problems, costs and dangers for utility owners, contractors and road users.  Location and attribute data on underground services can be very poor, in some cases especially for older assets even non existent. Improving mechanisms of integrating and sharing knowledge on utility assets and the location of street works are expected to lead to a reduction in the amount of street works in the UK by improving both the co-ordination of works and the quality of the information shared.

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Kat Quane, Road Works Policy Manager at Transport Scotland about Scottish initiatives to reduce underground utility damage.

Scottish Road Works Register

The Scottish Road Works Register (SRWR) is a system used by all roads authorities and excavators in Scotland to coordinate construction projects. For over 30 years, it has enabled them to share details of planned and ongoing construction projects including the location of underground infrastructure. Historically underground utility information has been shared by providing maps by email, websites, or distributed on CDs.

The Scottish Road Works Commissioner is an independent public official responsible to the Scottish Parliament. The Commissioner's aim is to improve the planning, co-ordination and quality of road works throughout Scotland.

Development of the Vault system

The Scottish Community Apparatus Data Vault (Vault) is intended to make underground asset information accessible to road authorities and network operators. organizations that have a statutory right to dig up in the public right of way. The participants in Vault are restricted to organizations that participate in the Scottish Road Works Register (SRWR) and have a statutory right to dig in the public right of way. In Scotland there are about 150 utilities, half of which have a statutory right to dig. The aim of the service is to allow timely access to information about all underground assets from a single centralized location to ensure the safety of workers in excavation as well as the public. Vault is funded as part of the overall SRWR funding.

The U.K. Mapping the Underworld (MTU) project, initiated in 2004 and largely funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and involving the University of Birmingham, University of Bath, British Geological Society, University of Leeds, Newcastle University, University of Sheffield, University of Southampton, and UK Water Industry Research (UKWIR), sought to address the serious social, environmental and economic consequences arising from an inability to locate buried utility service infrastructure without resorting to potholing. As part of MTU initiative the University of Leeds developed the Vault system as part of the VISTA (Visualizing Integrated Information on Buried Assets to Reduce Street Works) project. The Vault system was adopted in Scotland in 2012.

The systems provider of the Scottish Road Works Register and Vault is a private company Symology. Data is provided by network operators and roads authorities via an extract, transform, load (ETL) process.  One of the objectives of Vault is to be able to integrate data in a variety of format from different GISs. The data in Vault not only shows the location of underground infrastructure but also the type of equipment such as gas, telecoms, electricity, water and others along with contact details for the owners of the facilities.

At a minimum utilities are expected to refresh their data four times a year. In Scotland there is no national statutory limit on as-built and update backlogs. For volatile data sources data is refreshed every 2 months. However, U.K. regulators may regulate this. For example, Ofgem requires as-built and update backlogs to not exceed 42 calendar days (30 business days).

Data protection

Scotland has a history of working collaboratively. This tradition has enabled utilities and telecoms to share details of planned works in the national register up to three months ahead of deployment. Non disclosure agreements have not been required in works planning – since everyone is subject to the same rules, and everyone can see everyone else’s data, no one is commercially disadvantaged. Road Works data recorded on the Scottish Road Works Register (SRWR) is available as open data. The SRWC is subject to public body rules on cyber security and all participants must meet the highest levels of data security.

The information accessible through Vault is only available to users of the Scottish Road Works Register.  The Scottish Road Works Commissioner has restricted access to the register to the roads authorities and excavators working in Scotland. Data is not shared with any third parties without the express prior permission of those that supplied the data. Access to the Vault system to contractors requires vetting by one of the members, either a network operator or roads authority. Access to the system is restricted by email and password. The system can be accessed from a notebook or a handheld in the field.

Incident reporting

Reporting underground utility damage is not part of the Vault mandate. Near misses, injuries and fatalities are reported to Health and Safety of the U.K. Government. For the last 30 years underground utility damage is reported to the “Road Works Register”. While reporting is not mandatory, since 2005 this register has been designated a legal document, and represents a permanent record that can be used in civil litigation to determine liability in the case of damage. Not all incidents of damage are reported, but it is likely that the more serious instances are. An annual report is published by the Scottish Road works Commissioner based on the data in this register, but number of incidents of underground utility damage is not reported, nor is the estimated costs of damage estimated. However the data is available and the number of incidents can be determined. Kat estimates that the number of incidents is in “hundreds”.

Data quality

There is currently no requirement relating to data quality on the data submitted to Vault by network operators and local government. However, the data submitted by utility operators and roads authorities in Scotland data is generally compliant with the U.K. data quality standard for locating underground utilities PAS 128 (2014). Furthermore, many utility operators including Scottish Water, Scottish Gas, and Scottish Power are making a concerted effort to improve the quality of the data that is submitted to Vault and Kat reports that data quality is improving. An important benefit of a system like Vault that enables all underground utility data to be seen in a single view and compared with what is exposed during excavation is that it makes inaccurate data very apparent. There is greater awareness of the value of reliable data for reducing the risk of damage during construction, planning and design, preventative maintenance and reducing liability costs.

Vault will soon be mandatory

In 2012 the Vault system was deployed in Scotland on a voluntary basis.  Last year a bill to make participation mandatory in Vault was passed by the Scottish Parliament and has received royal assent.  The COVID-19 pandemic has delayed implementation of the new legislation, but it is expected to begin as soon as the economy reopens.

This is a ground-breaking national initiative involving legislation, regulation, new technology and especially collaboration between stakeholders to address one of the chief causes of highway construction delays, cost overruns and injuries to workers and the public.  The Scottish Vault system addresses the challenge of sharing the location of underground infrastructure among stakeholders involved in civil construction projects and is an important step toward reducing the risk of underground utility damage.

Australian water utility provides open access to water and wastewater network location data

Open data has become a goal for many governments, but is relatively rare among utility and telecom network operators and owners.  In Australia several water and wastewater network operators have made the location of their underground networks open and publicly available.  I had a chance to chat with Charles Moscato, Spatial Information Officer at Yarra Valley Water (YVW) about  their implementation of an open data portal which allows planners, designers, contractors and others to access and download raw geospatial data showing the location of YVW's underground facilities.

Background

Open data has been gathering momentum among governments.  An important impetus was the United States Federal Government where data has been in the public domain since 1909. The principle of free and open access to government geospatial data has been adopted by many governments including US Federal, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, California state and counties, and by municipal governments.  In 2013 G8 leaders (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union) signed a charter on open data.  The Ordnance Survey in the UK began releasing some of its data with open licensing as part of its OpenData initiative in 2010, but it wasn't until 2018 that the OS Mastermap was made openly available for the public and businesses to use.There is even an open data site showing underground natural gas flow and gathering lines in Colorado.

But being able to access prepared maps and other derived material is just a first step, governments need to provide access to raw geospatial data in commonly used Web-friendly formats. In the U.S. Data.gov was launched in late 2009.  In 2013, President Obama issued an Executive Order making open and machine readable the new default for federal government information in the United States.  At the municipal level North Shore City, NZ and Vancouver, Canada have been in the forefront of municipal open data.  By 2008 North Shore City had made its water, waste water and storm water network infrastructure publicly available on the web.  Vancouver's open data portal was initiated in September 2009.

A major motivation for open data has been government transparency.  But there is also evidence that open geospatial data contributes to the economy.  In 2008  Australia and later New Zealand commissioned studies of the contribution of spatial data to the national economy that have concluded that with appropriate government policies (such as open geospatial data) the contribution to the GDP, estimated to be on the order of 1%, could be doubled.

Open access to utility network location data

In Australia 12 local governments and water utilities have made the location of their water network open to the public.  The City of Gold Coast was the first in 2014. 

Yarra Valley Water serves over 30% of Victoria's population with water and wastewater services including 764,000 residential and 57,000 business customers. Historically the groups who needed access to the location information about Yarra Valley Water's underground network were (1) planners, surveyors, designers and other utilities who needed to plan around, build near or to connect to water and wastewater assets and (2) excavators and construction contractors who needed to avoid damaging underground utilities during excavation.

The process used by Yarra Valley Water to extract and provide this data was arduous, time consuming and slow.  20-30 request were processed per week requiring one full time person.  The turnaround time was typically about 10 days.

Business case for open data

In addition to a broad initiative at all levels of government to improve government transparency by making government data open, specific business benefits were identified.  The first objective was to make the process of providing accurate location and other data to designers and contractors more efficient freeing up one FTE for more valuable tasks.  Secondly automating the process would improve internal workflows for capturing, updating and publishing data.  Thirdly, replacing slow paper-based processes for data visualization in the field.  Another benefit, whose importance for improving data quality cannot be overestimated, is the ability for users of the data to report discrepancies. Another benefit is the avoidance of potential litigation when data was found to be incorrect.  From a business risk perspective an on-line system simply made access more efficient to data that was already publicly available via the Dial-before-you-dig (DBYD) service.

Data quality

In the mid 80’s to early 90’s the location of underground water and wastewater assets was digitized from paper drawings at various scales.  In Metropolitan Melbourne wastewater assets at 1 : 500 and water at 1 : 1000. In rural Melbourne both wastewater and water were captured at 1:25,000.  Attribute information was manually keyed in which was an error prone process.  The challenge was to find a way to convey to users the reliability of the data.

In 2018 Yarra Valley Water implemented the Australian quality standard AS 5488 - 2013 which provides users with a measure of the quality of location data enabling them to assess risk.  The AS 5488 quality levels are quite different from the U.S. ASCE 38-02 quality standard and the U.K. PAS 128 standard. The AS 5488 -2013 Quality Levels specify an absolute or relative accuracy.

1. Absolute subsurface feature location ±50 mm horizontally and vertically

2. Relative subsurface feature location ±300 mm horizontally and ±500 mm vertically

3. Relative spatial interpretation of position ±300 mm horizontally with indicative depths

4. Unverified and approximate position, roughly ±1 to 10 metres horizontally

About 75 % of Yarra Valley Water asset data was assessed a “D” Data Quality Level, this is either older data (2000s and earlier) or data with no association to a field survey.  After the 2000s the quality of asset location data is assessed at Quality Level C.  Typically this involves a site inspection to determine the location of visible above ground features and inferring the location of connecting pipes.

Open online access to network location information

In 2016 Yarra Valley Water decided to implement an on-line web application that contains up-to-date locations of current and proposed sewer, water and non-drinking water infrastructure in one easy-to-use map.  The site is updated daily with the latest available information and is open to all Australians.  The site was inexpensive to implement because the technology to do this has been around for a long time and was already used internally within Yarra Valley Water. The site provides a web map allowing users to browse the data.  Implementing this site freed up one FTE that had been dedicated to responding to requests for information.

But the most important feature is that once a user finds an area of interest, they can download raw geospatial vector data using the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Feature Service (WFS) standard.  This capability allows users to extract data when they need it, whether for planning, design or construction. This capability has appealed to designers, in particular, because it allows them to integrate the data into their CAD or BIM design tool. The significant benefits that result from knowing the location of underground utilities prior to design are well known.

Currently field staff and customers can report errors, but this process is currently arduous and the capability is used infrequently.  There is an initiative underway to replace this with a very simple way to report data errors such as incorrect location, wrong material, or inaccurate pipe diameter.  In the future it may be possible for vetted customers to make corrections to the data directly.

This is an example of the direct business benefits of open data for network operators and to the wider construction community.  It illustrates that implementing an open web portal is inexpensive and can have immediate tangible business benefits.  But perhaps more importantly it provides significant benefits for a number of use cases including utility damage during construction, emergency response, and an essential part of smart cities.

Mapping gas flowline and gathering system infrastructure mandatory in Colorado

There are nearly a million natural gas and oil wells in the United States, most of which have used fracking to release natural gas and tight oil from underground geological strata.  To gather and collect gas and oil from these wells a vast infrastructure of flowline and gathering has been placed in the ground.  For the most part this has been unregulated and the location of these pipelines is unknown.  The report from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into the 2017 explosion that killed two people and destroyed a home in Firestone, Colorado determined the likely cause was a natural gas leak through a pipeline that had been severed during construction of the home two years earlier.  The pipeline was a gathering line from an Anadarko well that had been officially abandoned, but the gas valve at the Anadarko well for the line had never been turned off.

When oil and gas operating companies develop new wells they bury flow and gathering lines to collect products from these wells. The lines consist of miles of unregulated pipe for which the operators themselves may not have exact locations, because the lines are generally considered “temporary use” assets. Once a set of wells was depleted, the gathering lines were abandoned, but remained in the ground.

In April 2019, Senate Bill 181 was passed in the Colorado assembly.  It made the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission (COGCC) responsible for regulating previously unregulated gathering lines.  In response to SB-181 new rules adopted by the COGCC late in 2019 required the oil and gas industry to provide maps of their flowline and gathering system infrastructure.  Much of this infrastructure had never before been documented or identified.

This rule making by COGCC has major implications for oil and gas companies. In 2013, Colorado had 58,200 miles of intrastate gas pipelines of which about 17,300 miles is gas gathering lines.  For comparison Texas, which has the largest pipeline infrastructure in the U.S. with over 450,000 miles of pipeline (about 1/6 of the total pipeline mileage of the entire United States), has over 240,000 miles of gathering lines, most of which is currently unregulated.  In Colorado the COGCC has collected information on about 7,000 miles of flow lines and has published publicly available maps of these flow lines on their website with an accuracy no less than plus or minus 25 feet.

Accelerating progress in open spatial data infrastructure at the municipal level in Canada

At the SDI Summit in Quebec City Gordon Plunkett offered an interesting perspective on the penetration of open spatial data infrastructure (SDI) at the municipal level in Canada.  Local governments are traditionally responsible for local services such as safety, infrastructure, environment, and recreation that directly impact citizens' daily life. But citizens are often not aware of available services. To increase citizen engagement local governments should make their services more easy to use, understandable, and relevant by providing them in visual form via web pages and web apps.

Background

Open data has been gathering momentum among governments initially driven by United States Federal Government data being in the public domain (since 1909.) The principle of free and open access to government geospatial data has been adopted by many governments including US Federal, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, California state and counties, and by the City of Vancouver and other cities.  In 2013 G8 leaders (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union) signed a charter on open data.  The Ordnance Survey in the UK began releasing some of its data with open licensing as part of its OpenData initiative in 2010, but it wasn't until 2018 that the OS Mastermap was made openly available for the public and businesses to use. But being able to access prepared maps and other derived material is just a first step, governments need to provide access to raw geospatial data in commonly used Web-friendly formats. In the U.S. Data.gov was launched in late 2009.  In 2013, President Obama issued an Executive Order making open and machine readable the new default for federal government information in the United States.

In Canada the Government of Canada announced its Open Government Action Plan in 2012.  The fundamental principle was a government-wide directive making government information and data available to the public by default. Geospatial has led the development of open data in Canada.  Of the 80,000+ datasets that are available on the federal government's open data portal, 69,000+ are geospatial. Currently in addition to the federal government eleven provinces and territories and over 60 municipalities have open data portals. At the municipal level Vancouver has been in the forefront of municipal open data - Vancouver's open data portal was initiated in September 2009.  In November 2009  the City of Toronto launched Toronto.ca/open, the City of Toronto's official beta data set catalogue, which provided open access to city data.  In January 2010 the City of Edmonton opened Edmonton's open data catalogue, which made city data including geospatial data openly available.  In 2010 Ottawa created an Open Data Ottawa site to encourage digital innovation, improved service delivery, and stimulation of economic growth.

A major motivation for open data has been government transparency.  But there is also evidence that open geospatial data contributes to the economy.  In 2008  Australia and later New Zealand commissioned studies of the contribution of spatial data to the national economy that have concluded that with appropriate government policies the contribution to the GDP, estimated to be on the order of 1%, could be doubled.  In 2015 Natural Resources Canada released the Canadian Geomatics Environmental Scan and Economic Value Study that estimated the contribution of the geospatial sector to the Canadian economy to be on the order of $21 billion.

Current state of open SDIs in Canada

Interoperability is key for an effective SDI. The inability to easily share data is a serious constraint on the value that can be derived from it. Gordon presented a simple SDI interoperability maturity matrix. Most municipalities probably fit into what he called syntactic interoperability, the ability to share data using common file formats and APIs.  Some have ventured in sharing data at the semantic level, which means recognizing content through shared data models such as the Canadian Municipal Data Model (CMDM), National Road Network (NRN), and NENA standards for 9-1-1.  A few are venturing into addressing the issue of different names for the same objects in different jurisdictions or in different disciplines.

Patterns of use for SDI include mapping and visualization, monitoring, field mobility, data management, analytics, sharing and collaboration, decision support, citizen engagement, and design and planning. 

Perhaps the top challenge for local governments, who hold the data that is most directly relevant to citizens, is making them aware of what is available and how to use is to address their every day concerns. Gordon presented some examples across Canada of interesting open data portals: Kamloops, British Columbia; Saint John, New Brunswick; Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia, which have made a lot of geospatial and other data available on open portals; St Albert, Alberta which enables citizens to report broken infrastructure and track progress in resolving issues; Regina, Saskatchewan which also makes a lot of data available on an open portal; Red River Planning District, whose site is heavily used during the annual Red River flood season; Brampton, Ontario, a poster child for open data and citizen engagement; Repentigny, Quebec, which enables users to easily determine the availability of municipal services close to where they live or intend to live; Prince Edward Island Hydro, which shows current electricity outages; and Mount Pearl, Newfoundland, whose portal include a parcel map in addition to roads and other basic map layers.

I would suggest that another data layer that should be part of every comprehensive SDI and that is missing in virtually all local, provincial, and federal SDIs is accurate maps of underground infrastructure in public right-of-ways.  Not knowing the location of underground cables and pipes has important implications for citizen safety and the reliable delivery of essential services.

In summary, local governments are traditionally responsible for local services such as safety, infrastructure, environment, and recreation that directly impact citizens' daily life. But citizens are often not aware of available services.  Local government can improve citizen engagement by making their services to more easy to use, understandable, and relevant by providing them in visual form via web pages and web apps.