Slashgeo

In this month newsletter, the Open Geospatial Newsletter provide a president's message about geospatial technology and standards inroads in the urban enterprise, mainly architecture, engineering and construction. From the message: "The AEC industry has been making great strides in transitioning from the 2-dimensional paper world to virtual world of Building Information Models (BIMs), which in addition to supporting 3D and 4D visualization and analysis, enable easier exchange of detailed building information among multiple stakeholders throughout the life cycle of a building. The AEC industry is essentially building their own kind of spatial data infrastructure in parallel with the one the geospatial community began advancing in the 1990’s to enable sharing of geospatial data. The Web amplifies and converges these efforts. In both domains, standards and the Web's infinite malleability are dissolving the barriers that have prevented data from becoming the useful resource it needs to be. And standards and the Web are also dissolving the barriers between AEC centered and geospatial data infrastructures."

I just learned about Building Information Modeling last week at GeoTec 2007, including talks from the OGC and about CityGML. The CAD-GIS Interoperability shares his account of the U.S. National BIM conference while Vector One shares his view on BIM and GIS. From Vector One: "When I consider BIM, I think of it not solely in terms of one structure, but also inclusive of the ’space’ around and interacting with a given structure. Those questions I might ask of CAD system during the design, operation and management of a structure are only part of a larger geospatial equation, one including GIS. Why? Because GIS are capable of analyzing the relationships of space and features independently or collectively, together."

Since most geoblogs are silent due to the U.S. Thanksgiving celebration, here's the latest Directions Magazine articles I wasn't able to share previously: here's links to their deCarta developers conference (devCON07) coverage, an article on the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and their commercial imagery strategy focused on the end-user, a short summary on the International Committee on Global Navigation Satellite Systems, another article on CityGML which is quite informative, an article on GPS-enabled device adoption driven by consumer awareness, a minimal CTIA conference coverage (CTIA is the international association for the wireless telecommunications industry) and equally short comments on the GEOINT 2007 conference.

V1 Magazine offers an interview with James Fee. James is a long time geoblogger running the excellent Spatially Adjusted blog and the useful Planet Geospatial. From the interview, which focuses on his new job and BIM (building information modeling): "V1: Are you able to utilize your GIS experience to work with GIS data in the BIM environment? Fee: There really isn’t a good way to interact with both GIS and BIM. When you’re inside of a Revit model, which is what they use here, you can import information in, but you’re not really able to utilize the GIS as its native format. You have to do some sort of conversion to get information in. Similarly, you can’t take our Revit model and drop it into our GIS and be able to interact with it. The interoperability between the two is very difficult at this point.[...] You think about people doing mapping with AutoCAD, and a lot of it is just isn’t really smooth. You’re making compromises, and the same is true with the GIS. When you’re getting into really detailed information such as where an outlet is in a room, you just can’t really do that kind of stuff in GIS. If you don’t take advantage of these two different systems, where they’re good and what they’re good at, you’re still going to be left with people asking a question that the software can’t answer."