Using Open Web Services for urban data management: A testbed resulting from an OGC initiative for offering standard CAD/GIS/BIM services

In 2006, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) started an initiative for gathering requirements and defining OGC Web Services that integrate information resources and workflows from the world of Architecture Engineering and Construction (AEC) with the world of Open Geospatial Web Services. While the Geospatial world has typically concerned itself with information about the out-of doors, and largely two or two-and-a-half dimensional information as would be found in maps, images and terrain models, there are many assets and activities that occur in the three dimensional context of buildings. Integration of the information resources of the AEC world with Open Geospatial Web Services will provide very important information resources for decision makers in urban environments, in situations like disaster management. This paper will discuss the challenges related to the definition of a web service for serving building information, by leveraging existing standards such as the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) and the Web Feature Service (WFS). A testbed experiment will also be described where a CAD/GIS/BIM client editor will combine the information obtained from multiple OGC web services for responding to a disaster scenario. enced and the third dimension is of common use. It is also likely that each department will persist its data in the native format required by its respective tools and systems and will want to avoid expensive duplication of the data in alternative formats for others to use. An Open Web Services architecture that integrates CAD GIS and BIM would offer multiple advantages for delivering up-to-date information in a rich format for the appropriate client application. It was also a requirement that existing standards in the AEC and Geospatial worlds be used for this integration, these standards are discussed in section 3. Considering the objectives, the problematic, the existing standards and the selected scenario, the participants determined the desirable components described in section 4 and developed the missing components in order to conduct the testbed explained in section 5.