GIS has nearly NOTHING to offer BIM beyond industry standards and models for dealing with geography et al. beyond the bounds (physical or otherwise) of the project being undertaken… except inflated egos and archaic jargon.

And this is huge. The CAD folks note the difference extends only to nomenclature. The GIS folks, however, tend to insist that only concepts classified with their terminology are capable of functioning with integrity, etc. Yawn.

So what’s gonna happen? CAD/BIM vendors will (and largely already have) provided their customers with the ability to share data (particularly imported data) with the GIS world. Their tech has been robust enough to absorb GIS for decades. Heck, most popular 3d video games created in the last ten years could run rings around any commercial GIS application when it comes to raster and vector analysis, distributed databases, and the ability to generate imagery to visualize the results of robust and gnarly analytic models. (A good example is the CryENGINE2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CryENGINE2)

GIS has to step up to the plate, if the Open Geospatial Consortium is going to get anywhere. GIS isn’t all that special. The people are, as are their research, and the potential is certainly of far greater significance, but this discussion is primarily about the tools, and most GIS tools provide little if any functionality not already present in the CAD/BIM toolbox.

A little humility from GIS, and we’ll start to get somewhere. Fast. (And exciting, I agree).

– Just a thought from a tired-of-all-the-delusion GIS professional in California.