I’ve just posted the second segment of the interview that I conducted with Jack Dangermond, founder and president of ESRI, back in May at the American Planning Association’s annual conference. The first part of our discussion focused primarily on sustainability issues. This second segment focuses largely on research and development priorities for GIS technology advancement.
Following is an excerpt from our discussion that I find exciting:
V1: How will GIS technology evolve in terms of visualization?
Dangermond: We’re working to drive GIS into the 3D domain. This has many different dimensions. It starts with extending the geodatabase models with support for full 3D, not 2.5D visualization, but true 3D data objects and features. This is done through technology extensions, extending how we model, store and represent geography in the database.
The second dimension is adding analytic tools that can do something with these 3D data models. These are things like 3D line of site, 3D buffering of objects, envelopes and volumetric representations through visualization. Tools that allow us to represent 3D in ways that are true 3D, not just pictures, where we can virtually walk into buildings and see both inside and outside.
To do this, we have to be able to model all sorts of objects, such as surfaces, volumes, facilities and buildings. In the last six years or so, there has been a lot of work on standardizing building information models or BIMs. The problem with these standardization efforts is that there are so many of them. There are CAD-based extensions that CAD companies have built. There are standards coming from the facility management world, the visual simulation world, etc.
Our approach is to build a GIS-based way to store and integrate the building information directly into the GIS, and then build interoperability procedures that interoperate between all the different proprietary and so-called standardized BIM models. We feel this is the way it’s going to go rather than one BIM model that people will use.
Why not have just one interoperable model? Because there’s such a strong relationship between the data model and what you can do with it, and how fast it performs. Different proprietary tools are designed to do very specific things, and therefore need a very specific model.
I believe that there will be lots of ways that these 3D building models emerge on the Web and in various technical manifestations, and they’ll be interoperable using extract, transform and load (ETL) tools. Our partner in Canada, Safe Software, is looking to extend their ETL tools into 3D space. That means we will have multiple BIM models and we will be able to talk to all these different models.
