In Brazil, It’s All About Geospatial Data: Collection, Maintenance, Processing

As mentioned in my previous post, it's obvious by the vendor exhibits at the MundoGEO Connect conference here in Sao Paulo that the focus is on data: data capture, data management and metadata.  That was brought home again in today's keynote  addresses.

Dale Lutz, vice president and co-founder of Safe Software offered his perspective on the community's ability to handle as much data as we are collecting. "We are inundated by data in the form of point clouds. LiDAR is inexpensive, accurate and voluminous," said Lutz. In addition, Lutz noted that while solutions from his company make it easy to integrate data by extracting, transforming and loading, i.e. spatial ETL, geospatial data to minimize myriad format exchange problems, this solves only part of the problem. "Everyone has difference jobs and different needs and the result is different formats."

Ruedi Wagner, vice president of imaging for Leica Geosystems, noted another challenge caused by point clouds. LiDAR creates n-dimensional data because it is possible to annotate points with hyperspectral data. This can lead to not only spatially accurate data but data containing information derived from sensors that parse spectroradiometric information into extremely narrow bands. "At 5 cm accuracy, you can map every single tree leaf … There is work for us for years to come, said Wagner."

Ray Kerwin, global product planning director for Topcon, discussed precision guidance of construction vehicles.  He showed how it is possible to monitor machine sensors for equipment health as well as establishing a geofence to make certain that the equipment does not venture outside an area where that equipment will not function properly.


And so, while Brazil is an extremely developed nation with well established infrastructure, the need to continually collect data for maintenance as well as new projects is paramount. As mentioned above, data collection equipment has become relatively inexpensive. However, the manpower to process these data is not and the country faces a challenge to education more geospatial professionals.

GITA Re-Assessing Annual Conference

I spoke with Bob Samborski, president of the Geospatial Information and Technology Association (GITA), this morning regarding some reports that have been surfacing about the status of the Geospatial Solutions Conference that took place this week in Grapevine, Texas. Attendance for the association's annual conference had been declining in recent years and there had been discussions among board members as to the future of the event. Several factors, inlcuding the economy, have led Samborski to indicate that the conference "had run its course." Both from attendees and exhibitors the feedback had been that while the program was excellent, the attendance was disappointing.

For next year, Samborski indicated that whatever the association decides, it will be "not this conference...not [in] this format." No dates have been confirmed for next year nor a meeting venue. This was the 34th annual meeting for the association and Samborski said it took some time for him to come to the conclusion that this may be the final event, but hastened to add that other alternatives are being discussed. One of those alternatives may include co-locating a similar GITA event with Utilimetrics, another utility technology association at their Autovation conference. Samborski felt that since Utilimetrics was another association that the fit with their business model may be most appropriate. These details will all be worked out in the future and an official statement from GITA will be forthcoming.

My take: Over the last several years, I've commented on the state of the GITA conference (2005, 2007, 2010) and have had many conversations with Bob. I think the decision taken at this time by the association is the proper one and the move to build relationships with other, similar utility technology associations will benefit the community of users and association members. It's time to change and as geospatial techology matures, we're seeing a shift toward vertical solution events rather than broad GIS conferences. While the conclusion of this annual event may seen unfortunate, the association should and will look toward other avenues to forge a different technology community.

Indian Infrastructure Development #GWF

For those of you who hear of the tremendous expansion of the infrastructure within India but don’t always get to see it, I wanted to offer these photos from Hyderabad (I took the photos while attending the Geospatial World Forum):

Rajiv Ghandi Airport (click for larger image) opened in 2009 and receives international flights direct from Abu Dhabi, Frankfurt, Dubai, and other cities. Other major Indian cities have also just opened new airports within the last 5 years including Mumbai and New Delhi.

Below is an image of a four-lane highway near the airport that wasn’t open two years ago when I visited. Other highways like this one were under construction as well.

Here’s another shot of the highway (Click for larger image)

The skyline looks like this in nearly all directions. Condos and office buildings are going up at a rapid pace.

Hyderabad is a city of over 6 million people in the metropolitan area.

Infrastructure Means Opportunity for Geospatial #BeInspired2010

By attending the BeInspired Conference in Amsterdam this week hosted by Bentley Systems I got the feeling that the global economy is being propped up by massive infrastructure projects. From the $59 million Jiangxia 500 kV substation project in China (shown at right… and China needs 200 more to support the growth of its economy) to London’s $24 Billion Crossrail project, a rail line cutting through the city, to offshore drilling platforms in Vietnam, the scope of the construction as well as the information processing and management aspects of these projects leads me to conclude that much of the growth in geospatial will be to support projects such as these.

To that end, Bentley released a study of their own to rank the largest owners of infrastructure by value. The Bentley Infrastructure 500 report, compiled over an 18 month period, ranks the top owners of infrastructure around the world from within both the public and private sectors.

How and why did Bentley undertake this? Bentley reviewed financial statements of these organizations and recorded the value of their tangible fixed assets, net of depreciation. Bentley found the yearly list of largest design firms from the Engineering News Record (ENR), based on current spending and project progress only, was inadequate to help them quantify the market, hence leading to this report. The result provides an understanding of who or what has the highest investment in total infrastructure. According to Bentley, total infrastructure of these 500 owner/operators is $13 Trillion, roughly the size of the U.S.’s annual gross domestic product (GDP) and equal to the combined GDP of China, Japan and Germany.

What this says to Bentley, as well as other information technology providers, is that efficiency in maintaining these assets will be driven by better information management and not necessarily in new buildings and projects. And while, this conference certainly illustrated the work of new and ongoing projects, the growth rate in places like China or India, and the impact of U.S. stimulus funds may soon peak. As such, work will turn to asset management through better “information management.”

Greg Bentley, the company’s CEO (above right), also referred to the high level of interest in 3D City GIS, a marketing program by Bentley to illustrate the integration of their solutions. The concept of integrated information management within cities is not new nor is the use of 3D visualization of infrastructure for urban planning or economic development. What’s changed perhaps is the fact that much more data has been digitally collected, now and within the past ten years, and the ability to exchange data between geospatial solution providers, whether though open standards or simply better ETL products, has allowed GIS analysts to explore 3D. In addition, product suites for geospatial and civil engineering are better integrated. So, when the need arises to show how the transportation network will be impacted by a new utility substation, the data are more easily retrieved, visualized and analyzed.

Malcolm Taylor (at right), head of technical support services for London’s (UK) Crossrail project, said that “Data is running through Crossrail veins.” While there’s lots of steel to bend and concrete to pour, Taylor knew that information technology would be key to efficient project management. He said that his “data strategy was to create an integrated design, facilitating multidisciplinary collaboration through the life of the project becoming the base for an asset management system.” Taylor shared that the GIS data alone consists of 231 tables, 420 layers, 34 thematics and 250 additional layers (unspecified) and called this use of these data “a pretty powerful way of working.”

As I listened to these presentations, it was hard not to conclude that geospatial technology for infrastructure management has a bright future now and beyond the current recession.

[Full disclosure: Bentley is supporting this trip with travel expenses]

Bentley Systems #BeInspired 2010 Event Opens with Congratulations to “Resilient” Users of Infrastructure Solutions

The economic climate from 2008 through mid-2010 has been challenging to some sectors of the world where infrastructure projects were put on hold. This is reflected in the success of those companies providing engineering and design software like Autodesk who sustained a decline and stock price (the company has since recovered nicely) and the Bentley Systems whose revenue declined in 2009 to levels seen in 2007, or about $50 Million. Greg Bentley, in his opening presentation at the BeInspired conference, said however that he believes that 2010 will show a rebound in his revenue run rate. Currently, Bentley shows a revenue balance of 61% international users versus 39% in the United States.

Bentley also showed a number of metrics to demonstrate the number of hours in which MicroStation was in use. MicroStation utilization hours measured approximately 23 hours per week per license (see example image from Asia at right). As such, though the global economy may be weak, productivity was decidedly increasing. On the investment front, Bentley made a major investment in SITEOPS , engineering software for site design which the company says is a glimpse into the future of SaaS for civil modeling.

Bhupinder Singh, Bentley’s senior vice president for software, discussed a number of initiatives for the company during the past year that resulted in product improvements including:

• Bentley update service – a web service that will give you notification when updates are available. Users can even set up filters whereby they will be notified on the subset of products in which they are interested to receive updates.
• Luxology is now embedded completely into MicroStation for civil visualization, an announcement that was made last May.
• Point Clouds are now a native data type inside of Bentley products
• In SELECTseries 3, to be released in 2011, users will be able to detect clashes between geometry and point cloud data.
• Integrated Structural Modeling (ISM) is a model synchronization solution that provides federation, consensus modeling and collaboration services. ISM was released one year ago and Singh said he as seen in increase in its use by engineering firms.
• Multidiscipline optimization (MDO) is a solution for determining cost benefit of alternative solutions for design structural designs versus the applications under consideration from multiple disciplines such as design, construction, energy analysis, etc. This methodology is used to help balance cost when weighing multiple design options. MDO is a non-deterministic methodology whereby there may be more than one answer to a given problem.

In general, Bentley is trying to layout a framework for instituting business intelligence (BI) for the engineering community that they call “information modeling.” Whereby the enterprise geospatial community may think in terms of integrating location technology into enterprise BI solutions, Bentley’s focus on design engineering translates that concept into deriving information by visualizing design improvements and reaping better return on assets (ROA). They seem to be more in tune with performance metrics rather than qualitative assessment for utilizing technology to help their clients demonstrate this ROA.

The BeInspired 2010 conference is an annual event for Bentley’s most innovative clients and awards are issued to selected nominees from those who have submitted entrees. In addition, over 60 members of the press are here for this event. I am serving as a juror for the "Visualization and Project Collaboration" category.

[Full disclosure: Bentley is supporting this trip with travel expenses]