A great amount of spatial information has been gathered about buildings when they are designed. But very little digital information is available for existing buildings - and other information relating to inside structures. Using geographic information systems (GIS), robotics and bridging computer-aided design (CAD) techniques, Penobscot Bay Media, LLC has developed mobile robotics for data gathering inside buildings, as well as developing one of the first GIS enabled data models for this work. V1 Magazine editor Jeff Thurston met with Stuart Rich of PenBay in London, UK recently to discuss these initiatives and to learn more.
V1 Magazine: What does information
visualisation mean to you and what is the relationship to GIS?
Rich: Information Visualization is
the art and science of presenting complex information and
relationships in a creative and intuitive way using a combination of
color, pattern, motion, and thoughtful design. Edwin Tufte
has done some of the most interesting work in defining what
Information Visualization is all about. We put a geographic spin on
this concept.
V1 Magazine:
How did the development of your product come about? What does it do?
Fig. 1 - 3D building breakaway.
Rich:
We got started on the path of bringing GIS inside the building about five
years ago when we were doing some facilities GIS work for a customer
at Langley Air Force Base. Langley is one of the bases absorbing
operastions from bases being closed by the BRAC process.
They needed to
better understand their space utilization so that they could
consolidate their existing footprint before building a bunch of new
facilities. We had significant challenges with their existing CAD and
a lack of a GIS data model for buildings. If I have ever had an
epiphany in my professional career, it was the realization that there
is tremendous opportunity to leverage the power of GIS for business
processes that occur inside buildings. We have been working hard on
these challenges ever since.
V1
Magazine: Can you explain how you see the relationship of GIS and CAD
to BIM?
Rich: This is a great question, and
one that the entire industry seems to be struggling with presently.
My personal view is that BIM represents a tremendous advance in the
capability to design and manage the construction of buildings. GIS,
on the other hand, represents a latent capacity to inform the design
of buildings and manage the operational aspects of buildings during
the O&M phase of their life.
V1
Magazine: Sustainability and efficiency involve everyone. How can
your technology be used so everyone can understand sustianability and
building efficiency better?
Rich: There are many ways that our
technology can be used to support sustainability and efficiency.
Chief among them we provide visualize and analysis capabilities that
extend traditional CAFM tools to enable better space utilization
(thus reducing overall space requirements). Our data collection
capabilities can also be leveraged to document and verify building
monitoring systems.
V1
Magazine: What is Envirometrics and how can your technology be used
for this purpose?
Rich: Envirometrics is the set of
environmental monitoring capabilities that we integrate into our data
collection platform. This technology can be used to document baseline
environmental conditions.
Fig. 2 - Building room measurement - location in GIS.
V1
Magazine: There must be different applications that depend on
accurate building measurement. Can you explain some of these?
Rich: There are dozens of
applications that depend on accurate building measurement. Among
them:
Move management and scenario planning
Space management and utilization
Emergency response planning
In-building inspections (Fire
inspections, permitting workflows, restaurant inspections, health
care inspections, etc.)
Lease management
Maintenance contract management
Work order management
Asset management
Space overhead chargeback allocation
Environmental condition monitoring
Wayfinding and routing
Security planning and management
V1 Magazine: Recently you expanded to
Europe. What brought this expansion about and how do you see the
European marketplace?
Rich:We recently expended to London
because we see the European market as particularly ripe for our
products and services. There is a substantial inventory of buildings
in Europe for which there are unlikely to be any existing CAD floor
plans because of the age of the structures. Europe is also very
focused on environmental sustainability and the efficient use of
space, both of which should encourage adoption of our capabilities.
We also were very fortunate to attract one of the former heads of
security at Heathrow to run our London office which will strengthen
our products and services in the security market.
V1 Magazine: Are there any inherit
benefits of CAD over GIS or vice-versa that you encounter? What are
they?
Rich: There are a number of inherent
benefits of a GIS platform over CAD. The most important of these is
that GIS offers a spatial analysis and visualization platform that
scales from the world to the widget. Most of our customers have real
estate holdings that are much larger than just a single floor (the
typical geographic extent of CAD floor plans). Additionally, GIS is
much more of a database centric platform vice a file-based platform
and this has significant performance and scalability implications.
Fig. 3 - Building environmental performance monitoring.
V1 Magazine: How important is legislation
in driving the adoption of your technology? Can you point to any
examples of this happening?
Rich: In many jurisdictions we are
seeing regulatory requirements driving the need to submit floor plans
to permitting agencies, environmental regulatory agencies, and
emergency response planning agencies. Often critical infrastructure
is an early requirement. In the states, we are also seeing regulatory
drivers from the Government Accounting Office forcing federal
agencies to account for the floor space they own or lease.
V1
Magazine: Does Web GIS or GIS Server offer any particular benefits in
the design and use of the information your technology creates?
Rich: Web GIS and thin client GIS
(ArcGIS Explorer) are critical to our strategy. In my view, the only
way that GIS will move inside the building is if we deliver light
weight, easy to use clients that make it easy to consume this kind of
analysis. Additionally, it is critical for us to deliver a Services
Oriented Architecture so that we can integrate with other enterprise
systems like CAFM, Asset Management, Work Order Management, CRM, etc.
V1 Magazine: Recently PenBay became
involved in publishing a data model - Building Interior Space Data
Model (BISDM). Can you describe what this is all about?
Rich: Penobscot
Bay Media published the first GIS data model for buildings under an
open source licens in the spring of 2007. In the summer of 2007, we
joined ESRI and a number of other important industry partners in the
development of a community GIS data model for buildings now known as
the Building Interior Spatial Data Model or BISDM. BISDM is now an
ESRI data model committee and published their first iteration of the
data model in the summer of 2008. It was announced at the ESRI
User Conference in San Diego this past summer.
It follows a similar
approach to other ESRI data models from ESRI such as ArcMarine and
the ArcHydro data models. As a result it can be considered as a
collection of Best Practices for integrating building information
into GIS. The advantage to this data model is that it provides a
methodology for the collection of information relating to building
spaces, but also includes a structure that enables effective analysis
using GIS techniques from the collected information. There were no
previously existing models for collecting data inside buildings
before this.
A great amount of spatial information has been gathered about buildings when they are designed. But very little digital information is available for existing buildings - and other information relating to inside structures. Using geographic information systems (GIS), robotics and bridging computer-aided design (CAD) techniques, Penobscot Bay Media, LLC has developed mobile robotics for data gathering inside buildings, as well as developing one of the first GIS enabled data models for this work. V1 Magazine editor Jeff Thurston met with Stuart Rich of PenBay in London, UK recently to discuss these initiatives and to learn more.
Fig. 1 - 3D building breakaway.
Fig. 2 - Building room measurement - location in GIS.
Fig. 3 - Building environmental performance monitoring.