Data sharing between GIS and engineering is a hot topic these days, for good reason. As professionals in both camps become more comfortable with starting digital and staying digital throughout the project, the obvious next step is to transfer digital data between GIS and engineering teams.
Building on a trend that resonates throughout the industry, ESRI has decided to expand its annual Survey and GIS Summit in July to include tracks in engineering and engineering design. "Expanding the Survey and GIS Summit is a natural progression because both the surveying and engineering industries employ GIS technology to manage or create geographic data," notes the ESRI announcement.
As conference director for AEC Science and Technology, June 20-23 in Orlando, the first session I named and sought a speaker for was "The Marriage of CAD and GIS." Karen Stewart, manager of geomatic services for the city of Langley, British Columbia, has been on top of this topic for years, and has been a popular speaker on the subject at other events. Here's the abstract she wrote for the three-hour tutorial:
| The Marriage of CAD and GIS
Learn how to bridge the gap between CAD and GIS, while creating new efficiencies in your workflow processes. Define the inherent abilities of both by comparing fundamental functions such as base map development, data collection, conversion, map projections, data structure, COGO, topology, spatial modeling, raster image integration and output presentation. Learn more about networks, geoprocessing, data management, and CAD and GIS Objects. Explore the use of an integrated model that can serve multiple purposes (i.e., to link CAD and GIS) and share access to a database by using an Application Programming Interface (API), whereby the same model is used for planning, design, construction, management, analysis and presentation. ESRI is under competitive pressure to make sure their GIS users have the ability to share data; civil engineering CAD leaders Bentley and Autodesk are both working from the engineering side to strengthen data exchange and common data use. Autodesk made a big deal out of GIS-engineering cooperation in an off-site visit for the press to Las Vegas Valley Water District during Autodesk University last December. Their service area has doubled in population in the last 10 years, and LVVWD was feeling the need to get more out of their accumulated twin digital stockpiles of GIS and CAD data. Their solution was to repurpose their existing installations of ESRI ArcSDE (spatial data server) and Oracle by writing a custom application that allowed AutoCAD users to directly post, extract, and update through SDE into the Oracle database. The system they put together had the extra benefit of allowing direct-to-web publishing via Autodesk MapGuide, opening the door to field-posting of redlines, GPS coordinate edits, etc. Bentley, via the Haestad Methods acquistion, has a very good utility for transfering data between AutoCAD and ArcGIS, GIS Connect. Oddly enough, it seems to be getting lost in the shuffle as Bentley absorbes Haestad. When I asked around at Bentley's recent BE Conference about GIS Connect, nobody knew the status. It was not listed in any of their materials as a current product. Bentley, of course, has two vertical units with a vital interest in GIS and CAD (Bentley Civil and Bentley Geospatial), they offer a custom tie between ArcGIS and MicroStation (created in cooperation with ESRI), and have announced that the next version of MicroStation will directly read ESRI shape (.SHP) files. But GIS Connect is an AutoCAD product, and that opens a new set of challenges for on-going support (Autodesk won't let Bentley join its developer group, for one thing). |