Jack Dangermond answered some questions that I’ve been wondering about since the GeoDesign Summit a few weeks ago. The concept of GeoDesign is an exciting development whose time has come thanks to technology advancement, but the fit with other vendors in the design space was puzzling me. Following is his response to a question about where GeoDesign fits with BIM.

“I believe strongly in the concepts of GeoDesign as an extension to GIS for designing the future. And yes, 3D aspects of this will be very important. This is one of the main areas of research that will be coming out in our upcoming software release this spring.

ArcGIS 10 will  emphasize five things: a rich and scalable GIS data model that supports intelligent and large “virtual city” size data bases, full interoperability with standards-based and proprietary BIM models, very fast visualization, 3D object editing (i.e. building placement), and full 3D analysis. This system will allow users and developers to build workflows that test alternative design scenarios and evaluate the results using both statistical and visual analysis tools.

Today, GIS can scale to very large data sets (virtual cities) and can be fully interoperable with other BIM technologies. It is also nearly as fast as the VIS/SIM environments but offers the rich analytic and multi-user capabilities familiar to GIS users. On the other hand it is not a 3D building design and editing tool and needs to be integrated with other BIM technologies at the workflow level.”

The full text of my Q&A session with Dangermond appears here.

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