Between the Poles - Autodesk GIS Blog

I was asked participate on a panel on open source geospatial organized by Eclipse LocationTech at the Location Intelligence in Washington DC. I decided to look at how software had changed since the early days of open source which I tend to tie to the formation of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) in 1999. What I found was that the proprietary and open source software landscape has changed dramatically in the last 13 years. Here are some statistics that provide an indication of just how dramatic the change has been.Apache Software FoundationApache which started off supporting the Apache http server developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) now supports over 100 top level projects. According to a Netcraft survey of 649,072,682 web sites in April 2013 Over 51% run Apache http serverAlmost 20% run Microsoft IISMicrosoftIn 1998 the infamous Halloween docs were leaked in which Microsoft identifed open source as a threat and discussed ways of combatting it. April 2013 is the first anniversary of Microsoft Open Technologies, Microsoft's own open source division. Microsoft also has another open source group, Outercurve, where more than 50% of the projects are run by non-Microsoft developers. Microsoft announced that Visual Studio now supports Github.BrowsersUntil several years ago, Internet Explorer was used by over 90% of users. The most recent statistics from W3Schools for April 2013 show marketshare for browsers is dominated by open source browsers, Chrome and Firefox. IE is a poor third now.Chrome 52.7 % (increasing)Firefox 27.9 % (decreasing)IE 12.7% mostly IE8 and IE9 (declining)Safari 4% (decreasing)Opera 1.7% (decreasing)Operating systems on personal devicesUntil several years ago, PCs running MS Windows were used by over 90% of users. Now handheld devices such as smart phones lead PCs in annual sales. IDC 1Q2013 statistics for smartphone shipments show that in the last quarter, open source operating systems are dominantAndroid 75.0% iOS 17.3%Windows Phone 3.2%Blackberry OS 2.9%Linux 1.0%Symbian 0.6%Software procurementIn many large organizations until recently the procurement playing field was tilted in favour of proprietary cmmercial and against open source software. In 2009 the Department of Defense (DOD), the world's largest IT organization, issued a memorandum that leveled the playing field by stating that “OSS [open source software] meets the definition of commercial computer software”. The memorandum went on to identify some of the benefits of OSS for DOD.Fewer defects - many eyeballs means fewer defectsFlexibility - easier to customize and adaptMultiple vendors instead of one - avoids vendor lock-inUnrestrictive license - simpler to deployCost advantage - when many copies are requiredCost sharing - reduces DOD costsPrototyping and experimentation - OSS particularly suitable for thisLarge IT systemsI blogged earlier about a study by Henrik Ingo that found that the world's largest OSS projects including Linux, KDE, Apache, Eclipse, Perl+CPAN, Mozilla+Addons, Gnome, Drupal and GNU are collaborative community projects governed by non-profit foundations like Apache and Eclipse. These projects are10 times larger than the largest single-vendor projects. Ingo recommended that vendors seriously consider participating in a collaborative community run by a non-profit foundation because they could expect 10 time growth in the project and its addressable market.MalwareSeveral years ago virtually all of the world's malware exploits targeted MS Windows. Now according to F-Secure, exploits against mobile devices are exploding. In 1Q2013 the main target for mobile exploits is Android which is open source.91.3% Android (49% increase over 4Q2012) *8.7% SymbianApple, Microsoft, and Blackberry - free of malwareIn 1Q 2013 for the first time Android malware was identified by F-Secure as being distributed by email in addition to apps.Geospatial open sourceThe Open Source Geospatial Foundation was formed in 2006 supported by Autodesk. Prior to that geospatial software was dominated by proprietary vendors ESRI, Intergraph, Autodesk, Bentley, and others. Now there are many open source geospatial companies that provide alternatives to proprietary vendors. They primarily rely on OSGEO software such as PostGIS, OpenLayers, MapServer, GeoServer, and others. Earlier this year ESRI acquired GeoIQ and now offers both open source and proprietary software.Open geospatial standardsOne of the key reasons for the rapid expansion in the deployment and use of open source geospatial software solutions is the open standards developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium notably the SQL Simple Feature Specification, KML, WMS, WFS, GML, and CSW. Open source and open standards are very different things, but open source gravitates to open standards. It is hard to imagine that geospatial open source would have progressed as rapidly and widely as it has without the OGC standards.

May 22

Reusing integrated geospatial and design data across the construction lifecyle

One of the most important things that impressed me at the Geospatial World Forum 2013 (GWF 2013) conference in Rotterdam is the degree to which in the Netherlands that building information modeling (BIM) and geospatial are perceived to be tightly linked. In my previous post I gave an overview of a presentation by Bram Mommers, who works for the large private engineering company ARCADIS, on why integrating geospatial into the construction process is important.Jaap Bakkers, who is with the Rijkswaterstaat, the national water company in the Netherlands, presented more details about the Concept Library (CB-NL) initiative. It is supported by the Dutch Council on Building Information (BIR), which is a joint industry and government council created to foster the development of building information modeling (BIM) in the Netherlands. It includes government agencies such as Rijkswaterstaat, private construction contractors, and engineering and architural firms. Government funds it, but most of its expertise is seconded from industry. Construction processes in the NetherlandsIn the Netherlands many government projects are private-public partnerships (P3), where a private sector firm or consortium is responsible for the design-build-finance-maintain phases of the lifecycle and the government as the owner is responsible for operation.Many AEC firms are adopting BIM because it is cheaper, reduces risk of budget, schedule overruns, and results in fewer change orders. They may be motivated to adopt BIM to increase their margin or because they are required to by the owner, which is often a governmental organization such as the Rijkswaterstaat. Once construction is complete, at commissioning, the owner is handed a large volume of facilities data and as-builts. But this data is often unusable by the owner because it is incompatible or non-interoperable with the owner's asset management, GIS, and other systems. This is the primary objective of the Concept Library (CB-NL), to create standards that enable re-use of design and construction data for operations. This is one example of the data impedance problem, where at every handover, design to construction, construction to operations, data is lost and has to be recreated.Geospatial in the construction processMarcel Reuvers, Manager of Geo-standards at Geonovum, gave an overview of some the critical roles that geospatial plays on the construction lifecycle. Planning / preparation phaseAsset management / maintenanceManaging as-builtsI would add sustainable design which always requires geospatial information about local prevailing weather pattern and the location and orientation of neighbouring structures for right to light, wind, solar heating, natural lighting, solar PV generation potential, and other analysis.I blogged previously about some fundamental changes to the construction process that will make geospatial central to the construction process. What has been proposed is that a post-construction survey would become the critical source of reliable asset information in the form of a 3D intelligent model which would be maintained in a geospatially-enabled asset database. When a new project is initiated, 80-90% of the necessary information would already available in the database making a complete resurvey, as is the current construction practice, unnecessary. All that is required before design can begin is minimal due diligence to validate the as-builts. The new process also implies that there is a reliable geospatially-enabled asset database that is maintained thoughout the operations and maintenance phase of the lifecycle.Concept Library (CB-NL) In the Netherlands there is already a standard decomposition for buildings called COINS. The idea is to build on this to create a general approach for decomposing infrastructure as well as buildings and that it suffiiciently general to include geospatial. The Concept Library is intended to map different terminology across domains: design, engineering, architecture, construction, asset management, facilities manmagement,and geospatial. For example, it interelates terms like arch bridge, rail bridge, spanning structure, viaduct, and crossing, each of which may be used by a different domain to refer to the same structure. The business benefit is that it would reduce the data impedance problem, where at every handover in the construction lifecycle, designer to contractor or contractor to owner, data is lost and has to be recreated.The vision is that the Concept Library is an open database based on a standard ontology that is searchable and has an open API so that vendors such as Autodesk, Bentley or ESRI can develop interfaces to it for their products. CB=NL and geospatialCB-NL was initially focused on BIM, but is being extended to include geospatial. CB-NL enables designers, contractors, asset managers and GIS staff to share a common dataset. It also makes it possible to automate the process of populating asset and facilities management application and GIS databases for the operations and maintenance phase of the lifecycle.Concept Library (CB-NL)A two year project to develop the Concept Library has just been initiated, in January 2013, which is supported by a large number of government and private organizations. It is using the OWL ontology language, which has been endorsed by the W3C. It uses tools and constructs from buildingSmart's Semantic Constructs for inputting and editing semantic content. Real world pilots, for example, a Rijkswaterstaat water services project and the Schipol, Amsterdam, Almere ring road project, will be used to demnstrate the practicality of the approach.According to Marcel Reuvers, there are a number of standards that relate to the CB-NL project from a number of standards bodies including the OGC, buildingSmart, ISO/TC211, and LandXML. Jaap Bakker said that the project team has been in touch wth the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) in additon to the buildingSmart Alliance about the CB-NL project.

May 21

Integrating geospatial into construction: the challenge

I spent most of last week at the Geospatial World Forum 2013 (GWF 2013) in Rotterdam, which was an amazing event, because of its focus on monetizing geospatial value in vertical industries, Industries for which there were symposia at GWF 2013 include construction and infrastructure, electic power and gas, mining and exploration, water as a resource, water distribution management, and agriculture in addition to more traditional sectors such as land management, photogrammetry and the environment. I spent most of my time in Construction and Infrastructure sessions. There were many absolutely fascinating pesentation on the applicaton of geospatial technology in this sector. Among the most far-reaching in terms of potential impacts were three or four talks that explicitly addressed the challenge of finding a practical way to integrate geospatial into construction processes.Value of geospatial information To put this in context, there is a strong drive in the Netherlands to integrate geospatial information into govenrment organizations. Geonovum is leading the charge in this area. By way of motivation there is a very interesting cost-benefit analysis in the context of the European INSPIRE initiaive by Ecorys and Grontmij in November 2009. The scope of study was the cost and benefits of the collection, maintenance and dissimilation of geographic information, but just within governmental organizations in the Netherlands. The study did not attempt to estimate the value of geospatial information to society as a whole. It concluded that over 15 years, the total net benefit to government organizations in the Netherlands would be € 34 million (Ralf Duinmeijer, Joulz ICT private communication).Cost of poor interoperabilityTo put this in the context of interoperability and what poor interoperability costs the economy and individual firms, in 2004 in a remarkable study the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) attempted to identify and estimate the efficiency losses in the U.S. capital facilities industry resulting from inadequate interoperability. The NIST study focussed on interoperability problems attributed to the highly fragmented nature of the industry, the industry’s continued paperbased business practices, a lack of standardization, and inconsistent technology adoption among stakeholders. It concluded that inadequate interoperability cost the U.S. capital facilities industry $15.8 billion in annually in 2002, but qualified the conclusion by saying that this is likely a conservative figure because there were additional significant inefficiency and lost opportunity costs associated with interoperability problems that were beyond the scope of NIST analysis. At GWF 2013 it was reported that Rijkswaterstaat, responsible for public works and water management as part of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure, has estimated that poor interoperability costs it € 800 million per year. Barriers to integrating BIM and geospatialBram Mommers, who is with ARCADIS Netherlands, set the stage by looking at what the barriers are that are hindering the integration of geospatial into the constrcution process. (ARCADIS is a large international company that provides consultancy, design, engineering and management services in the fields of infrastructure, water, environment and buildings.) Traditionally the challenge has been that civil engineering on one hand and geospatial on the other have been different cultures. The way Carl Steinitz put is that they work at different scales. Geospatial scientists deal with the universal, engineers with the very specific. Bram gave some examples of these parallel worlds. Geospatial folks make maps, engineers and architects make drawings. Engineers and architects use CAD or BIM design tools. Geospatial folks use GIS. The geospatial standard for buildings and infrastructure is CityGML. The AEC standard for BIM models is Industry Foundation Classes (IFC).ARCADIS has been involved in projects that integrated geospatial into the desing process. On the HOV Nijmegen project it was found that integrating geospatial and engineering design in a single database resulted in a single copy of each data element and multiple use. It simplified communication and increased the quality of the final design. It also enabled automated analysis of the consequences of design choices with the result that the planning cycle was shorter. Bram mentioned several other projects that benefitted from the integration of geospatial with the construction process.Based on their experience with these projects, Bram and his colleagues concluded that there are three main barriers to the integration of civll engineering and geospatial.Semantics - for example, different terms used for the me things by geospatial analysts and civil engineers and designersDifferent topology - examples, (1) geospatial uses point, lines, and polygons; CAD/BIM uses splines, nurbs, and other parametric curves and treats polygons in a different way from geospatial topology; (2) features with location vs objects with location as an attributeData formats - for example, geospatial data is stored in shape files, GML, and CityCML; CAD/BIM uses DWG, DGN, RVT files, and IFCMapping semanticsTo address the first issue of semantics, a Dutch initiative called Concept Library (CB-NL) sponsored by the Dutch Council on Building Information (BIR), a joint government and industry initiative, has been created with the objective of developed an open, on-line system to map between the terminologies used in different domains. The goal is a single integrated model for construction (buildings and infrastructure) that would allow design, construction, maintenance and operations to share the same data. The concept library would be extended to include geospatial. The overall goal as Bram stated it isOntology for the build environment - multiple sets of domain terminologies mapped on to itOne languageCombines geospatial and constructionThe impacts of this appproach that Bram sees areStore once, use multiple times - avoid redundant dataIntegrated information management - based on data custodiansGeolocation as a property of an object - in additon to featuresBram listed a number of organizations in the private construction sector that are supporting this initiative.

May 20

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