Friday, May 30. 2008

What's New is Old in Geospatial at BE Conference '08

In piecing together the salient geospatial product news from this year's BE Conference I can't say that I heard much new news! In fact, much of what we covered at last year's BE Conference seems to be a repeat. But let me give you the "Cliff Notes" version of what I heard and what is possibly some new information:

1. The operative word now for Bentley Map is "infrastructure" such that the product is offering features and functionality for infrastructure management and has all of the bells and whistles of MicroStation V8 XM Edition.
2. Will Bentley Map be able to import an ESRI SDE Geodatabase and not just shapefiles? Robert Mankowski of Bentley says there are plans to do so. Today, if you point it to a personal ESRI Geodatabase, you can import it now using an open source library for personal Geodatabase. For SDE databases, Bentley doesn’t have it today. With ProjectWise Connector for ArcGIS, you can exchange data with ArcGIS. If ESRI provides a API in the future for SDE, Bentley intends to use that library. You might want to check out James Fees' blog for some additional information.
3. If you have Bentley MicroStation and Bentley Cadastre, a parcel management solution, you don’t need Bentley Map as Cadastre contains all the functionality of Map.
4. Athens, the new Bentley platform that was announced last year, was given its full intoduction this year. We'll have a more comprehensive report on Athens at a later time. No press releases were issued at the event. With respect to Bentley Map, Athens will provide better querying and joining to other database tables as well as adding more advanced labeling and annotation functionality.
5. Bentley Geospatial Server (BGS) is Bentley's answer for "enterprise GIS." BGS performs spatial indexing and searching and has the ability to manage complex files with references; and multiple application integration (MS OFFICE, AutoCAD, and ESRI). BGS uses a federated approach to data management that allows you to get both geospatial data and other unstructured data as well. BGS is comprised of ProjectWise Integration Server, ProjectWise Geospatial Management, ProjectWise Connector for Oracle and ProjectWise Interplot. What’s coming in BGS? Spatial indexing and searching feature though a “google-like” toolbar; better backround map using Bentley Geoweb publishing engine. Spatial Database Services support for Oracle GeoRaster, Oracle Cartographic text and ArcSDE Raster to get extraction of raster from ArcSDE database. Implementation of standard OGC specifications WFS, WMS; SOAP Wrapper and WSDL support (post Athens).

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