Open Geospatial Consortium Interoperability Day (Part Two)
Topic: Intergraph, ESRI, OGC, standards, sensors|The Oct. 4 meeting featured a panel of “experiences” as well as a fascinating keynote from Doug Eberhard, CTO of construction firm Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB). PB manages very large projects including the World Trade Center site rebuilding, the Los Angeles International Airport master plan, and Seattle’s Alaska Way Viaduct. Mr. Eberhard stressed how the construction world is still mostly planning in two dimensions, despite decent modeling tools for three. He asserts it is people that are holding things back because while they possess 3D data, they do not want to share. PB uses a 3D infrastructure modeling approach to convey its plans visually, linking models to schedules (3D plus time equals 4D, he says). It works, with realistic and highly communicative time-lapse animated 3D fly-overs and drive-throughs showing planned building and final outcomes. Mr. Eberhard stressed that in addition to marketing value, such models lead to building with the least amount of disruption as possible by identifying conflicts early in the process, perhaps before building begins. It is fair to say the audience of OGC participants was extremely impressed with what they saw and the integration of CAD with geospatial information.
The experiences panel pretty much was flat, in a 2D sense. However, they shared some fascinating efforts. Johnny Tolliver from Oak Ridge National Labs showed a Sensor Alter Service (SAS) used at Fort Bragg, NC for quickly notifying mobile resources of various issues. SAS is built on the XMPP transport standard for short messages. Intergraph manages the alerts and sensor information that includes live video events. OpenGIS Location Service (OpenLS) tracking service is also used. Kevin Shaw of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory described its GIDB Portal System that is essentially a middleware broker taking 1,500 data sources and providing them to clients of various types for usage. NASA contractor Nadine Alameh showed a similar broker, its Earth Science Gateway. ESRI’s Jeanne Foust, Global Manager of Spatial Data Infrastructure, discussed the importance of standards and showed ESRI compliance as well as lessons. One of Jeanne’s main points was that the need for interoperability in GIS is not new – GIS has always required interoperability; it is the nature of the beast. However, she also stressed that standards must be transparent to end users in order to be effective. Brian Lowe wrapped up the experiences panel with a discussion of Canada’s National Forest Information System.
Business takeaways? Most of the presenters were from government or their contractors, however, some lessons convey:
1. Data sharing is a critical issue. The technical interoperability issues are being resolved through OGC and other groups. Privacy and security, as well as politics are at play.
2. Visual displays convey information in ways no other medium can. For some applications 3D beats 2D and 3D animated can convey even more.
3. Sensors tied to location are hot. Sensors with communication capabilities tied to their coordinates create a whole new set of potential applications.
4. Standards are great but they must be transparent to end users. Vendors are working to provide that transparency.