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Industry News
Be Inspired Symposium and Awards 2009 Geospatial Report
By Susan Smith

Bentley’s Be Inspired: Infrastructure Best Practices Symposium and Awards held October 12-14 in Charlotte, North Carolina was an invitation only event showcasing the company’s annual Be Inspired Awards.

Greg Bentley, CEO, Bentley Systems

The event encompassed a number of product and acquisition announcements, as well as an awards dinner to honor the winners in various categories. Finalists gave presentations on their projects, and executive roundtables were held focusing on the different industry segments. In this report, those announcements and winners that are germane to the geospatial industry will be highlighted.

Bentley’s focus is on infrastructure, which encompasses just about everything in the built environment: buildings, bridges, roads, plants and the underground. For a full report on keynote presentations and AEC offerings, see AECWeekly.

Product announcements:

The October 2009 availability of MicroStation V8i (SELECTseries 1) is relevant to geospatial in that Bentley products built on MicroStation such as Bentley Map will also become available at the time of that release. This newest version of MicroStation features innovative and flexible value-creative enhancements for infrastructure professionals highlighted by RealDWG library support and integrated 3D printing capabilities.

Some highlights of the soon-to-be released MicroStation V8i SELECTSeries 1) include:

• RealDWG interoperability advances.
• 3D printing support
• Dynamic Views for drawing composition
• Luxology animation

Delivering “dynamic” collaboration – ProjectWise Navigator V8i and Bentley i-models will include:

• Static visualization limitations
• Dynamic collaboration empowerment
• Value creation affordability

Details of specific geospatial software announcements will come closer to release date.

The immediate availability of Country-Level License Pooling and Passport Subscriptions was also announced. Country-Level License Pooling, Bentley’s latest SELECT subscription enhancement, expands the benefits of site-level license pooling. Passport Subscriptions provide, for named users, an affordable alternative to perpetual license purchases.

Acquisitions

Bentley acquired gINT Software, headquartered in Santa Rosa, Calif., a company that has provided geotechnical and geoenvironmental products since its founding in 1986. It is Bentley’s intention to address infrastructure underneath the ground as well as infrastructure on top. gINT’s newest product, gINT Enterprise, “maximizes the value of centrally managed subsurface data through multi-project reporting and extended querying power.” The product is designed for transportation operations, engineering consultancies, plants, campuses, and state and federal agencies with vast quantities of geotechnical data. With gINT Enterprise companies can reuse subsurface mapping information to serve civil, structural, geotechnical, and environmental information processes for owner-operators.

This is not a product that is well-known in geospatial, yet since Bentley and gINT already share thousands of customers, those customers and others will benefit from the integration of the two softwares.

From the press release:

With the phased rollout of gINT Enterprise, infrastructure professionals can expect to:

• Report on and query subsurface data from an unlimited number of projects,
• Standardize how an organization’s data is entered, imported, stored, and reported,
• Share data with related software programs including CAD, GIS, contouring, and modeling applications, and more,
• Visualize gINT data using the software’s extension for ArcGIS.

Bentley has entered into a technology agreement with Pointools Ltd., a high-performance software that exploits point clouds captured by 3D laser scanning of infrastructure assets, including aerial LiDAR surveys. According to the announcement, through this agreement, Bentley has licensed Pointools’ super-fast Vortex API engine (and its ongoing upgrades) for incorporation in MicroStation and all other software products that leverage Bentley’s platform technology.

The Pointools engine will be valuable to the AEC industry but interesting to geospatial in that it will make use of LiDAR surveys and possibly other geospatial products. Pointools is able to handle very large point cloud datasets, comprising billions of points from almost any scanning source. Press materials report that the Pointools Vortex engine will allow users to uniquely reference and geospatially coordinate point cloud files within the context of vector geometry and raster data.

Bentley Be Inspired Award Winners

Innovation in Utilities

Huntsville Utilities of Huntsville, AL won in this category, for their “Integrated Implementation of ProjectWise, Expert Designer, and SAP.”

Innovation in Utilities Award Winner - Huntsville Utilities

Located in the northern part of Alabama, the municipal utility serves 163,000 electric, 84,000 gas, and water, for which they have historically maintained separate records for the three separate departments. Each department has maintained a separate design and mapping standard, and methods included pen, whiteout, MicroStation and FRAMME. The goal of the organization was to move to an integrated design platform.

Jay Stowe, vice president of Operations and Rob Getman, project manager, spoke on how Huntsville Utilities formed a cross-functional project team with Bentley to configure software and convert data. The project included linking Oracle Spatial with Bentley’s utility solution, integrating Bentley Expert Designer with ProjectWise, and interfacing these products with SAP. The benefits of standardization became apparent with the first comparison test of old versus new systems. Errors in the old system had caused a costly miscalculation.

“Until August 3rd of this year we used highlighters and did everything by hand,” said Stowe. “We have 600 employees, a waterworks, gas board, and a electric utility board.”

The driver for change was a need for a common platform. They had an SAP implementation that they wanted to implement concurrently with GIS which would handle materials, cost centers, compatible units and designs.

The organization needed an integrated design system for electric, gas and water, and a common mapping system that was compatible.

The plan was to implement ProjectWise and Expert Designer for gas, water and electric. They could convert gas and water later. They added an interface with SAP and electric conversion, launching the project in November 2009.

“We had MicroStation XM, but then V8i was launched so we went with it,” explained Getman. The advantages of V8i included V8i support for Oracle Spatial, enhancements and bug fixes from XM, better support for the latest release, better return on development costs, and a faster turnaround on bug fixes – “the company (Bentley) spends more time fixing the bugs in new releases.”

As a result of moving to V8i, Getman said they found new bugs quickly, had more frequent maintenance releases, they lost about a month of time and work as their schedule slipped as a result of reworks, and also they needed to train staff on using V8i.

The ProjectWise configuration integrated with Expert Designer and the SAP Project System. Currently the workflows and document management system. SAP generates a new project and sends it over to Bentley and will send over the results of a design. “We were configuring both systems at the same time, we could define how far we wanted to go with it, we also faced a lot of complexity,” said Getman.

Benefits of the new system included:

Unified design and mapping environment –

• Lower overhead
• Simplified training
• Simpler interface to work management system

Expert Designer

• Fast more accurate designs
• Repeatable results

Configuring Expert Designer in-house

• get exactly what organization wants
• can update upgrade themselves.

ProjectWise integrated with Expert Designer –

• Central repository of all project related information
• Integration with SAP
• Using Oracle Spatial

The project is not yet complete, but mapping data conversion is now underway.

Innovation in Water, Wastewater, and Stormwater Networks

In this category the Government of Maharashtra, Water Supply and Sanitation Department won. Madhuri Mulay, sub-divisional engineer-IT Cell, spoke about “Crisis Management of Water Supply in Developing Countries - Maharashtra, India.”

Innovation in Water, Wastewater, and Stormwater Networks Winner - Water Supply & Sanitation Dept., Maharashtra, India

17 million people were without water in the Mumbai metropolitan area of the state of Maharashtra, India when a Supreme Court ruling restricted water distribution from the Krishna River, thereby cutting off water supply to the region every Friday. The cities that got their water from the Ulhas River were affected. Although service was restored on Saturdays, it took up to 30 hours for water to reach some areas. This situation caused riots in 13 municipalities.

Mulay said that besides the obvious public safety and sanitation issues, the Mumbai area is important because it generates a lot of sales tax, so they needed to develop a solution that would protect the water supply during crisis. As the situation had reached crisis proportions with rioting and vandalism, the water department developed a hydraulic model that allowed engineers to locate the problem and design a solution.

According to Google Maps, the Krishna river rises at Mahabaleswar in Maharashtra in the west and meets the Bay of Bengal at Hamasaladeevi in Andhra Pradesh, on the east coast. It is one of the longest rivers in central-southern India. The Ulhas River, which is the local source of water for the state of Maharashtra originates near Karjat in the Western Ghats Range, and flows westward through Raigad and Thane districts of Maharashtra between Kulgaon-Badlapur, north to Ulhasnagar (to which it gives its name) and on to Kalyan, where it turns west to Thane. Near Raw water pump house of MIDC Jambhul the river meets Barvi Dam discharge water also called as Barvi River. The confluence is a tourist and fishing hub for villagers around. At Thane the river splits into two branches which flow west and south, respectively, around Salsette Island, on which lies Mumbai. The main branch turns northwestward to Ghodbunder, where it opens into the estuary of Vasai Creek. Thane Creek flows south to empty into Bombay Harbour. The estuary of the Ulhas is the site of the historical ports of Kalyan, Kopri (Chersonesus/Coprostaneum) and Shurparaka (now Sopara)).

Mulay described the region as having a ridgeline separating the flow directions of naturally occurring rain water. Three hydroelectric plants at the foothill on the west branch use the water from east flowing streams. Water from the east flowing waters are flowed to the west. Bhivpuri Hydroelectric can only let out a certain amount of water from the Ulhas River.

In this situation, water was not reaching the tail end of the system, and it took 14 hours to fill empty pipelines. 25% of the population of the region get their water from local sources.

There was no time to conduct experiments, Mulay said, they needed a hydraulic model, so they studied the modeling of an entire pipe, simulating scenarios of the actual crisis condition, and re-engineered the network accordingly.

By acquiring satellite images, also digitizing all roads and landmarks, they were able to use Bentley Water to simulate and export data to WaterGEMS. “Even at the farthest node sufficient water was available,” Mulay said.

They solved the water supply problem when the valves were set, and the water started filling. Sufficient pressure was available immediately after opening the valve. Using WaterGEMS, Bentley Map, and Bentley Water, the modeling was accomplished quickly and efficiently. As a result, the 30-hour lag time was eliminated, and with it, the need to bring in water tankers. This resulted in 4.7 billion INR savings.

Mulay said the indigenous model was prepared in-house, and a full fledged GIS model using Bentley Water was used for the first time in India. Prior to this, the pipe network resided in people’s brains, not on paper or digitally, she said. It was unclear how long it took to create the new maps using the Bentley products.

For brief project descriptions, see Bentley Be Inspired Award Winners and Finalists.

For journalists, hotel, airfare and some meals for this event were covered by Bentley Systems.

Top News of the Week

ESRI now offers access to more than 40 beginning, intermediate, and advanced instructor-led GIS courses through a variety of training alternatives and venues including
-- Video-recorded training at all ESRI learning centers in the United
States
-- Video teleconferencing training at the ESRI learning centers
-- Virtual Classroom online training delivered to students' own workplaces
or home computers

Global PC shipments rose 2.3% year on year in the third quarter of 2009 (3Q09). The increase is an important continuation of recovery from year-on-year declines of 6.8% in the first quarter and 2.4% in the second quarter of this year. Seeing market growth ahead of the launch of Microsoft’s Windows 7 bodes very well for the fourth quarter and next year. All regions except Japan either met or surpassed expectations. Portable PCs continue to account for the majority of volume and growth, with Mini Notebooks are still making a substantial contribution.

Acquisitions, Agreements, Alliances

ERDAS and Observera announce a new partnership to develop an integrated solution based on ERDAS APOLLO technology. This solution will be available to U.S. clients.

Observera is integrating the Sensor Model-based Automatic Registration Tool (SMART) registration engine into ERDAS APOLLO, providing another option for delivering registered image products. This solution will augment ERDAS APOLLO’s data provisioning and processing workflow and provide an end-to-end solution for customers that require detailed registration of images.

Rolta Asia Pacific is pleased to announce that Rolta’s GeoSpatial Fusion solution powered by Rolta OnPoint will be integrated with intelligent oblique aerial imagery provided by AAMHatch to provide oblique imagery. This new capability is enabled through spatial and imagery processing power of OnPoint and Rolta’s unique integration between OnPoint and Pictometry. The partnership with AAMHatch and the Rolta’s Geospatial Fusion engine powered by OnPoint will be used to provide new Pictometry imagery from AAMHatch for all major Australasian cities, including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart, Wellington and Auckland.

NAVTEQ announced that Genesys International has become a reseller of NAVTEQ map data.

NAVTEQ has signed a new global contract with ALK Technologies to supply map data and content for the company's CoPilot Live GPS navigation products. This new agreement reaffirms an already longstanding relationship between the two companies.

Tele Atlas and DLT Solutions, a value-added reseller of industry-leading information technology (IT) products and services, announced an expanded agreement that will make Tele Atlas data and products for the Americas and Europe available to government buyers on General Services Administration (GSA) IT Schedule 70 number GS-35F-4543G.

Announcements

NAVTEQ announced the registration deadline for the NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge has been extended one week from 30 October 2009 to Friday, 6 November 2009 for the Europe-Middle East-Africa (EMEA) region. A completed solution is not required at the time of registration. All EMEA registrants will have until November 20, 2009 to submit their solutions but must first complete registration. The regional winners of the Global LBS Challenge for EMEA will be announced on 14 February 2010 prior to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Global platform, device and media sponsors of this year’s competition include deCarta, DeviceAnywhere, HTC, Tanla, GPS Business News and The Code Project. The competition is open for pre-commercialized applications for any platform and any device, with a global prize pool currently standing at $8.2 million US and expected to grow. For more information on this year’s competition, go to LBS Challenge.

The Carbon Project announced it exhibited near-real time geospatial access solutions at the GEOINT 2009 Symposium on October 18-21, in San Antonio, Texas.

The Carbon Project’s Gaia SDI platform was used to access high-value, time-dominant geospatial-intelligence (GEOINT) at the symposium. Based on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the Gaia SDI platform is designed to provide the next-generation of access, update and geosynchronization capability for intelligence, military and humanitarian assistance requirements.

Financials

DigitalGlobe announced that lock-up agreements entered into with its underwriters in conjunction with its initial public offering will be extended 18 days beyond the Company's November 9, 2009 earnings release. The lock-up period was due to expire on November 9, but the Company's underwriting agreement provided for an automatic extension, depending on the timing of DigitalGlobe's quarterly earnings press release. The first sales of shares restricted by the underwriter's lock-up may take place on Friday, November 27, 2009.

People

GeoEye, Inc. announced the appointments of four new members of its financial team:

Ramsey W. Price, CPA, was named vice president, Financial Systems and Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance. James M. Craig, CPA, was named vice president, Special Projects & Treasury Operations. GeoEye also announced that Charmaine O. Pavelko, CPA, was named director of Tax. Michael E. Harbour, CPA, was named assistant controller.

New Products

Intergraph has introduced its Motion Video Exploitation solution that enables analysts to geospatially integrate video with multiple intelligence sources to provide unprecedented situational awareness and strategic decision making capabilities.

Intergraph's Motion Video Exploitation solution fuses and displays video data, including data from unmanned aircraft systems (UAS), with satellite imagery and geo-intelligence, delivering an exceptional level of actionable intelligence in real time.

IceWEB, Inc. announced the availability of a turn-key rugged notebook computer to allow the DOD, DHS and Intelligence Community to allow forward deployment critical GIS data into virtually any environment. The new Notebook, called "WorldBook," has the industry's largest disk capacity currently capable of storing more than 1.28TB of data. Additional features include optional GPS, 3G Wireless, smart card reader and sunlight readable display. Updates to the imagery can be deployed to the field on IceWEB disk-packs and upload with available fire-wire interface.

LizardTech, a division of Celartem Inc. and a provider of software solutions for managing and distributing geospatial content, announced the release of the MrSID Plug-in for ArcGIS 3D Analyst.

ERDAS announces its annual release, with new versions of ERDAS IMAGINE 2010, LPS 2010, ERDAS APOLLO 2010 and other desktop and enterprise products. In addition, ERDAS is introducing several new products, including IMAGINE Feature Interoperability and IMAGINE SAR Interferometry as well as a technology preview of LPS eATE.

DigitalGlobe released the first images from WorldView-2, the company's most recent high-resolution, remote-sensing satellite. Initial images, issued after just 11 days on orbit, captured Love Field Airport near Dallas and the AT&T Center in San Antonio, Texas. More refinements to early-stage images can be expected as the ongoing check-out and calibration continues.

NSim Technology, an IT company specialized in geospatial decision support and simulation, announces the Beta version of NSim Contour, now available online.

This interactive map application provides decision makers a way to efficiently manage geographic information in an online collaborative environment.

Pictometry International Corp. opened its 4th annual FutureView user conference in Orlando, FL with a special announcement for all its government customers (who have previously purchased Pictometry imagery): Beginning this month, all of these Pictometry customers can apply to receive Pictometry Online (POL) for up to 200 users per county without charge for up to one full year.

The free seats will enable these government entities to distribute POL seats to as many as 20 users of this powerful visual information tool in each of up to 10 internal departments such as 9-1-1, GIS, Assessment, Public Safety, Planning and Development.

Intermap Technologies announced the compatibility between Intermap’s NEXTMap DEM data and Eternix’s Blaze View visualization solution, enabling real-time presentation of any 2D imagery in 3D. Raster images, vector data, and video can be accurately placed on top of Intermap’s 3D terrain models and presented in Eternix Blaze View on-the-fly without the need for pre-processing. Combining the capabilities of the industry’s new standard for geospatial base maps from Intermap and Eternix’s sophisticated software brings geospatial users a step closer to the long-awaited world of real-time 3D visualization.

Teradata Corporation announced that the Teradata geospatial solution opens up a completely new world of data warehouse analytics for business users at extreme performance levels with in-database geospatial analytics.
Typically, location data is represented by postal references such as addresses. Although addresses are great for delivering mail, they provide limited value for business intelligence or analytics. The Teradata geospatial solution enables customers to convert the basic location data in their data warehouse to the common latitude and longitude coordinates, a process known as geocoding. Once converted, the geospatial data can be integrated and analyzed along with other customer data.

IDV Solutions announced that Visual Fusion 4.5 Beta was unveiled at the GEOINT 2009 Symposium in San Antonio, TX.

Visual Fusion 4.5 will be officially launched in a few weeks, with GEOINT serving as a premiere platform to showcase the new capabilities. Best-in-class business user experience has always been a hallmark of Visual Fusion, and this tradition continues with new visualization capabilities available via a timeline viewer, time filters, heat maps, and more. As always, end users can incorporate these compelling visuals in mashups of organizational and internet content that they create themselves in just hours or minutes.

Z Corporation unveiled the world's first automated, monochrome 3D printer and the company's most affordable automated 3D printer to date, making advanced rapid prototyping technology more accessible to mainstream engineers and architects. Like other Z Corporation 3D printers, the ZPrinter 350 converts 3D data into physical models much as desktop printers convert word-processing files into physical documents.

Rolta Canada Limited announced the new release of Rolta OnPoint. This latest release, OnPoint 6.3.1, continues to enhance the power of Rolta’s Geospatial Fusion solutions by providing support for ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 and introducing powerful new features such as CartoPrint, Attribute Table Viewer and Charting functionality.

Blue Marble Geographics announced the release of Desktop 2.1 with Geographic Calculator 7.4. This release introduces full support of HTDP (Horizontal Time Dependant Positioning) reference frames and coordinate reference systems in Calculator along with enhanced support for Alberta Township Systems and much more. Blue Marble’s geospatial data manipulation and conversion solutions are used worldwide by thousands of surveyors and GIS analysts at software, oil and gas, civil engineering, surveying, technology companies, as well as universities, government and military organizations. The Blue Marble Desktop is the all-in-one geospatial data transformation platform for Blue Marble’s coordinate, vector, raster, and spatial database applications.

GeoFields, Inc. announced the demonstration of a gas distribution risk modeling solution at the ESRI Electric & Gas User Group (EGUG) Conference. GeoFields will show the upcoming release of RiskFrame DIMP Modeler in the GeoFields booth #216, October 12-13, 2009, at the Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, Georgia.

UK aerial survey company Bluesky has launched an easy-to-use property heat loss mapper to help Local Authorities view thermal data collected during airborne thermal imaging surveys. The HELIOS (Heat Loss Investigation System) web based reporting tool, developed by Manchester Geomatics, will help energy and environment teams understand the results of thermal surveys and allow cross referencing of data with other information.

China TransInfo Technology Corp. announced that the Company's real-time traffic information mobile phone application, Palmcity Live-Traffic, is now available at China Telecom's Surfing Space AppMarket ("AppMarket").

Around the Web

View From the Bridge, October 9, 2009, Editorial, The New York Times (registration required)

Herhold: Government failures flourish in dark by Scott Herhold, October 19, 2009 - San Jose Mercury News

County GIS system to be upgraded within month, by Jeff Patrus, October 20, 2009, Roscommon County Herald-News

Location Based Services in 2014 - Part 1 , October 19, 2009, Geothought, blog by Peter Batty

Events

 

 


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-- Susan Smith, GISCafe.com Managing Editor.