Wednesday, May 2. 2007

BE Conference Geospatial Themes

In listening and speaking with Bentley staff and users about geospatial I teased out these themes from this year's BE Conference. While you read these recall that Bentley is about 12 years old as a company tackling GIS and other industries. (Disclosure statement: I was a member of the Bentley Geospatial team briefly in 1995.)

Engineering First, GIS as Needed
I don't think Bentley staff would say it this way, but that's my sense of how GIS is positioned. That's a big idea that helps distinguish how Bentley sees GIS in contrast to other software companies. Bentley is subtly saying, "We are an engineering software company." As a corollary, perhaps, one could say: "Engineering and GIS are not equal." No, they are not and there's no reason give them equal billing in products or marketing. I might even say "Bentley has 'gotten over' GIS."

Document/Information/Content Management is GIS
Again, don't expect to hear Bentley staffers say that, but the constant referral to ProjectWise as the center of the engineering universe reinforces it. Back years ago I used to participate (as a GIS software company staffer) in seminars touting the integration of GIS and document management; the links were weak at best. Bentley has taken the lead in stating emphatically that these solutions are part of an engineering, and thus a geospatial, solution.

Core Engineering Platforms Must be Spatially Enabled
Bentley is making a big step forward by putting what we'd call "on the fly coordinate transformation" into the core of MicroStation. (They call it geo-cooredination.) It's perhaps the strongest statement by a vendor yet that AEC, Civil Engineering, Plant and other technologies occur "in the real world" and will in time be further integrated geospatial data and analysis. It was a bit weird to have to wait for the final keynote, the "platform" keynote to see the technology to be included in the Athens (next MicroStation version) release in action. The demo from Barry Bentley worked just like I would have expected. You can attach reference files either by "plopping them down" without looking at their geographic coordinates or you can enable geo-coordination and have them be projected on the fly to match the coordinate system of the current design file. The user need know little. Barry noted that if you want you can use a linear transformation to place data, too, via something called the AEC transformation. The linear transformation, he was quick to point out is quicker than the geographic one. He showed using Google Earth placemarks to set up such a transformation and briefly demoed how core MicroStation at the Athens release directly support NMEA GPS data.

[Disclosure: Bentley covered travel, hotel and food.]

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in GPS, Bentley BE 2007 at 13:56 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

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Adena:

A client recently asked us to investigate integrating our mapping services with their new document management system which was originally undertaken without any thought given to a "spatial" hook. But now that they can call up their "traditional" GIS layers on a spinning globe, they want to link to their non-spatial data (that has some sort of spatial reference buried in its attributes).

Moral of the story: the big growth is not in GIS qua GIS but in the more general sense of information visualization and data retrieval applications that use geography as the primary context.

BT

#1 Brian Timoney (Link) on 2007-05-02 14:30 (Reply)

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