There’s a growing (renewed?) interest in the Internet of Things around the benefits for a more instrumented and connected city. IBM organized a session at SXSW in Austin that took place this morning titled, “City as Platform.” The objectives of the session was to discuss the role of information architects, the interface of systems with the built world, the steps needed to transform the thinking of planners and builders toward viewing the city as a platform, and the role of citizens  in the design.

Participants include an impressive array of technologists, city advocates, and planners/designers. The session is certainly an important one for wider advocacy of this “system of systems” thinking. The makeup of the panel and the objectives of the session are fully outlined on this Blog post from the Smarter Planet blog, with promises for a recap post and podcast to follow.

The following video from IBM was posted today to YouTube, and it provides a great overview of IBM’s view of “The Internet of Things.”

The Open Geospatial Consortium has been hard at work on many fronts to drive down barriers to interoperability and to facilitate more open dialog between organizations and institutions. I just conducted a Q&A with David Schell, founder and chairman of the board of OGC, in order to get up to date on the many initiatives. One of the more interesting areas for our coverage deals with the better sharing of information about global change, and I enjoyed Schell’s answer, paraphrased below.

“GI Science” as it’s usually used is still too narrow a term. “Interoperability science” encompasses what we are talking about. One of the first interoperability science issues we need to address is the issue of sharing of information between various data centers, and making research data more discoverable and accessible. Data centers can’t be stovepipes anymore, they have to be “loosely coupled,” so any data center can be accessed by any data provider or user, with appropriate permissions, of course.

We’ve been working toward this for years in terms of technical interoperability issues, and we have working groups in hydrology, Earth system science, etc. who are developing application schemas that meet their intra-community and inter-community data sharing needs. We see individual scientists and small groups in various projects moving in this direction, but what’s really needed is a cultural dialog.

The OGC working groups are hard at work on things like geosemantics, data quality and uncertainty, geospatial rights management, “table joining,” and many other challenges, and application domains are using the OGC to facilitate both technical and semantic interoperability.

This focus on interoperability science is a growing niche to drive through both process and workflow in order to deal with global change. Read the full interview with Schell for more insight into OGC’s ongoing work.

High quality videos from the GeoDesign Summit are now online and free for viewing. There are some excellent presentations there from a variety of presenters. I’d like to point out the video of Michael Gallis as a good starting point. He delves into the definition of GeoDesign in the context of government decision making and points out the promise for a “truly meaningful” toolset with outcomes on policy. The tone and delivery are exhilarating as a rallying cry to speed the adoption.

Digital 3D visualizations and simulations of urban areas have been possible for a long time. The shelf life of one of these creations however hasn’t been impressive. I’m sure that most large cities have various moth-balled models that may have been effective for their purpose when created, but now don’t have much utility because they are just like snapshots in time that become dusty and outdated.

The thing that most of the moth-balled models have in common is that they’re simply a different means of rendering rather than really modeling in the full sense of that word. To fully model reality means that the model contains details and intelligence about construction, materials, and various network connectivity so that it can be used for all means of analysis.

The business case for creating a dumb 3D model has always been suspect. It’s received ho-hum reactions from many professional quarters when its realized that it doesn’t have much utility beyond an individual project. Thankfully that old dumb model is slowly going away, and with it goes the ho-hum attitude about models. When users realize that they can access and analyze the model specific to their own interests, then the questions of utility fade away and the business case for their creation manifests itself. The business return on an intelligent model is frankly limitless, because the more intelligence that the model has the more efficient a municipality becomes — saving time and dollars and creating a more livable community.

The model itself is uninteresting. It’s the ongoing use and ever-increasing fidelity and intelligence that will power wider adoption. The rise of intelligent models for more intelligent infrastructure will power a myriad number of careers and business opportunities in the years to come.

The new digital resource center at the State Library of Queensland envisions the future library as a place for creativity for, “art, design, gaming, engineering, sound, science, craft and architecture.” The idea of the new facility called the Edge is to foster connections for multidisciplinary design work and to foster innovation.

The $7.9 million construction project has created a multipurpose space that includes sound and image recording labs and meeting and function rooms, all equipped with high end digital equipment. The director of the center has an idea for the center to become a hub for urban informatics – the study of how people interact with urban spaces by tapping information and data of our digital lives.

Read more about this cutting-edge facility in this feature in The Australian.

Cost of entry into Mobile Mapping work is a considerable expense according to Lewis Graham of GeoCue from the ASPRS Hot Topics Session at ILMF 10 in Denver.

• $750 to 900K for the mapping system
• Vehicle $50K
• Production hardware $150K
• Production software $125K (can share some hardware and software if you already have airborne)

Personnel costs include the need for a driver, equipment operator and surveyor on the collection side. On the office side there’s a need for a production manager, geometric correction specialist, and at least two data collection technicians.

Mobile mapping has hit its commercial stride in 2009. As many as 10 different systems were sold last year even in a down economy.

Software is lagging now to exploit the data, but more software and solutions will emerge to speed up the data processing and visualizations of the final product.

I recently spoke to Fred Limp, the past director of the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies and a gifted geospatial educator and practitioner at the University of Arkansas. I’ve always been fascinated by the types of projects that Fred works on, and I conducted an interview to delve into the evolution that’s taking place in the 3D space.

Fred and his team have been working on LIDAR applications and digital city modeling among other cutting-edge applications. An area that Fred is tackling is the analysis of 3D data at multiple scales, which offers some unique challenges:

“What happens when scale changes is not just a simple case of there’s more and bigger data sets.One of the real challenges that I see to the whole geospatial community is that when you “zoom in,” you do a whole lot more than just zoom in. You have to change paradigms of analysis and sometimes the data structure. One of the things that I find particularly exciting that is helping us begin to think about this is that the work being done on CityGML and the use of the concept of levels of detail.

Our community has a bunch of verticals, there’s the remote sensing vertical, and the LIDAR vertical, and the terrestrial laser scanning vertical. But we also have all these horizontal applications that we have to decide what tools and what methods and what analysis to do at different scales. The level of detail concept in CityGML begins to give us a paradigm for moving seamlessly from scales of 1 to 50 or 1 to 100,000. We need to develop analysis and display systems where we know how to begin thinking about that.

I think that’s a really important idea and I don’t know if people have really addressed it. It’s about how you think about data as you move between different scales, and what analytical operations makes sense. To me, that whole scale issue is something that we really have to think about a lot because so much changes as you move through different scales.”

Read the full interview online here.

The Open Geospatial Consortium and the buildingSMART alliance have just completed a report regarding the software interoperability issues that are faced in the architecture, engineering, construction, and owner operator community. The AECOO Testbed looked at methods to increase efficiency and provide cost savings by more streamlined project processes. Sponsors for the testbed included the architectural firms of HOK, Burt Hill, and Ellerbe Becket; general contractors Webcor and Gilbane; the U.S. General Services Administration and the American Institute of Architects.

The testbed aimed to address the productivity loss and fragmentation in the facilities development industries, and the need for software interoperability to not hold back efforts to improve the process. The testbed looked specifically at three areas of the process: Building Performance and Energy Analysis; Quantity Takeoffs for Cost Estimation and Communications Project Delivery and Decision Support.

Among the interesting findings of the report:

“We found that design-software-to-design-software was the least useful information sharing case to address. In the course of a design project, there is little need to share all aspects of the design between project participants. What is more important is to exchange relevant elements of the design between the lead architecture firm or lead general contractor and subcontractors with specific expertise in areas such as lighting, energy usage, building cost, HVAC, circulation, etc.”

The process began with agreements to standardize business practices, before tackling the need to standardize information sharing between software practices. The use of the methods and processes developed in AECOO-1 were shown to reduce timeframes from weeks to hours.

Download and read the full report here.

Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory China Energy Group have developed software to integrate building life-cycle assessment, energy use and emissions from construction of a housing development through to occupation. The aim was to model the building material lifecycle to track where the materials were produced and the emissions impacts of their transportation. The tool also takes into account the impacts of lifestyle choices of residents, including transit choices, consumer goods, food consumption and heating and cooling costs.

Read more about this tool on this World Changing blog post.

At last year’s SPAR Conference, ClearEdge3D’s automated extraction of CAD models from point clouds stood out from the crowd as a much needed tool to aid productivity. A telling story of the progression of the productivity shift that has happened with the advent of LIDAR tools is that in the past a large project may have needed five surveyors in the field with just one CAD operator. When tripod-mounted LIDAR arrived that shifted to one or two field workers, and five CAD jockeys back in the office. That further shifts with mobile LIDAR to one or two operators in the field and twenty back in the office. With this change to heavier data processing burdens, and the increasing volumes of data that accompany the more advanced collection tools and methods, there’s an obvious and glaring need for quicker and more automated processes.

The ClearEdge product fits neatly into this area, because it ingests point cloud data and automatically extracts 3D Cad models, which is often the primary workflow of a LIDAR project. Instead of gee-whiz technology this year, the emphasis of the company was on real-world applications and case studies. While the technology was being highlighted in the 3D Technologies track, users of the technology were discussing their use of the tools in their data capture workflows in the Scan to BIM conference track. The users repeatedly emphasized the time savings that they gained by adopting this automated data extraction tool.

Among the case studies that the company touted was an application by Stantec Engineering on a road and rail crossing project in one of the busiest intersections in Calgary. The constant flow of traffic meant that laser scanning was the only real option for data collection from both a safety and least amount of disruption perspective. The firm estimates that the ClearEdge tool pared down the time it tool to create the model from one week down to just four hours.

Another cased study was in the capture of a large federal building in Chicago by Ghafari Associated. There the adoption of the technology meant the elimination of redundant modeling steps to provide access to the data much more quickly. In this case, the time from scan to model was critical as the time to deliver the model was compressed. The scale and scope of this project was massive, with 500 scans of the building, and the delivery of a Revit model of the exterior and interior of the building complex.

In one year’s time, there were many more project examples across the board at this event. The company fought through the eastern snowstorms to make a delayed appearance at the event, and I’m sure they’re glad that they did. With their emphasis on productivity gains, with cost and time reductions on data processing, their product was very well received.