May 2

Contents

Editor's Introduction

This week I report on a new source of location data and bring you the highlights of the Bentley user conference. Plus, a handful of press releases.

Last week I forgot to remove "TEST!!!" from the subject line when sending the issue out to the subscriber list, after sending it to our internal list. Then, I immediately sent it out again, because I thought that most of you had probably deleted the first one. I had made this mistake before, weeks ago. My apologies!!!

Please note, next week I will be on vacation and we will not publish GIS Monitor.

— Matteo Luccio

First American Begins to Sell Location Data

While companies like Tele Atlas and NAVTEQ have long been in the business of collecting location data solely for the purpose of selling it, on April 16, First American, a company that has long been collecting location data for internal use, began selling it to select external partners. It aims to collect data for most of the United States by the end of next year.

Started in the 19th century in California as a title company, First American now has more than $8 billion in annual sales and is one of the largest U.S. providers of business and real estate information. According to the company, its products touch more than 90 percent of all property transactions that occur in the United States every year and it manages a portfolio of more than 80 million properties for the largest U.S. lenders.

First American originally developed its geospatial technology to analyze its internal flood-zone risk data for the mortgage and insurance industries. It claims that it makes more than 10 million flood determinations a year and is, therefore, perhaps the largest volume user of GIS applications. These determinations require extreme accuracy and reliability, because the company must guarantee every one it makes.

To support its core business, First American developed a parcel and point database with data on 141 million parcels. To create and maintain this database, it had to develop complex procedures to reconcile boundaries and verify address data—a system it now calls ParcelPoint—as well as establish relationships with state and local governments. Because in the United States parcel data is usually maintained by counties, but 2,225 of 3,141 have not yet digitized their parcels, First American relies heavily on the interpretation of aerial photography—a very labor-intensive process, for which it has opened a large facility in India.

I discussed Parcel Point with David Rogers, First American's director of marketing, and Scott Little, senior vice president of operations. They were very tight-lipped as to what, exactly, the company has developed and is productizing—referring to "certain patent-pending things that we're not at liberty to talk about at this moment." Basically, they explained, it comes down to quality assurance processes and methodologies and a group of parcel-centric GIS "capabilities" that they built.

"We provide flood determinations to mortgage lenders and insurance companies," says Rogers, "which is a federal requirement anytime anybody buys a home. If they are in a FEMA floodplain, they are required to buy federal flood insurance." According to Little, the company was using normal GIS data—such as street layers, geo coders, and aerial photography. "Over time," he says, "we began to acquire and normalize parcel data, whether it was digital or raster, and convert it. By the middle of last year, we had collected around 25 million parcels that we were using to locate not only boundaries but also the structures within each boundary and overlaying it with different aerial imagery. At that point, other people began to express interest in acquiring a normalized data set."

Parcel data is very decentralized and comes in all different types of formats, Little explains. "Just to acquire it, normalize it, and maintain it is a task that doesn't make sense for a lot of companies to do. For us, being our internal business, it makes a lot of sense. So, around the middle of last year we decided to move toward building a national parcel layer. We have partners in place to acquire and convert the communities that are only in raster format." For those communities that can't even acquire or compile the raster data, he adds, "we have people and processes in place to get that work done."

First American will ship the data—in tabular format and with boundary shapefiles—to companies that buy a yearly license, for them to use in street data sets, geocoders, and other products. In the second quarter of 2008, it plans to release Web services for those who just want to download data on one parcel at a time. "The technology is really on the back end," says Little. "Our overall goal here is to build up the entire data set and make it available to people. Then we will start working on building solutions around that data set."

To acquire data in remote areas, Little points out, First American relies on its staff all over the country, who have relationships with small communities, especially with regard to titles. The more densely packed an area is, I suggested, the better the traditional methods work, whereas in rural areas, and in some suburban areas, geo-locators don't work as well because buildings are spread out. "I think you are exactly right," Little said. "We have to do a lot more Q.C. in rural communities." By contrast, he says, large cities usually have GIS departments and good data.

First American does between 50,000 and 60,000 flood determinations a day, Little says. "We have a high automation rate, but around 5,000 to 6,000 still require a manual determination by a map analyst. We have a pretty large built-in quality control mechanism and we're using the digital parcels, aerials, and street networks. So, if a community has bad parcel data, we're usually able to identify that real quick and then work back with the community to correct it." This is a key point, because this iterative process provides value to these communities. Also, for communities that don't have digital data, FAC will digitize their raster images. "In some ways," says Little, "we're subsidizing some of their initial GIS build-out for the parcel data."

Because First American's internal needs drive the process, Rogers points out, the company also constantly maintains the data—and can do it efficiently because of the many relationships it has established. Initially, he says, it will focus on providing the data to large customers in a few key markets—such as navigation, wireless, and emergency services—who will query First American's servers. "In Austin, Texas, where we're based, we have two different separate data centers, plus a data center in Dallas, and a premier data center in Santa Anna, California. So we have the bandwidth and the capability to manage that. We will also probably have some regional partners that may require us to dish out the data on a disk."

Unlike companies that sell only address point data, FAC will also be able to sell polygons and the coordinates of front and back doors, fire hydrants, driveways and so forth—as well as such information as the most prevalent type of roof in an area.

Bentley Expands Geospatial Capabilities

Bentley's next major release, due out next year under the name Athens, will include a feature that Bentley calls geo-coordination: essentially, it consists of support for projection on-the-fly in MicroStation, ProjectWise, and vertical solutions. Bentley is replacing Bentley Navigator with Projectwise Navigator and now "deprecates" MicroStation Geographics, which it launched in 1995. "Geographics was Bentley's entry into spatial," said Styli Camateros, Vice President, Civil & Geospatial Products. "We realized that it didn't have a core purpose. It was a hodge-podge of a thousand things. It was a tool box and a bunch of, frankly, experimental stuff." In short, it was not a polished end-user product. In 2004, Camateros explained, Bentley began to develop Geographics' replacement, which became Bentley Map, an end-user tool, and the MicroStation Geospatial Extension, a development platform. New versions of both are due out in August.

Bentley has so extensively updated Bentley Map, Camateros said, that it is, in effect, a new product. "We invested a lot of effort and time trying to understand what we needed," he said. "Getting GIS functionality—data management, feature modeling, spatial analysis—into the platform." The next layer up consists of applications for the various verticals—such as communications, water, and sewer. Above that is the Geospatial Server, which enables the management of geospatial data.

In his geospatial keynote address, Camateros noted that, since last year's user conference:

• the cities of Toronto, Montreal, Helsinki, Calgary, and Edmonton have joined Bentley's Municipal License Subscription (MLS) program
• Bentley became a principal member of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC); as part of its OGC membership, Camateros noted, Bentley participated in the OSW-4 initiative and in the ongoing implementation of OGC standards in products (including WMS, WFS, GML, and CityGML)
• Bentley released the first industry application on the Industry Application Framework and XFM technology, for electric utilities, with the promise that applications for gas, water, and communications will follow, later this year, and
• Bentley released WaterGEMS V8 XM Edition.

As indications of Bentley's "openness," Camateros cited the integration with Oracle 10g Spatial and the adherence to OGC standards. At a press briefing, however, he indicated that Bentley "has no plans"

to financially support open source software development. "It is a decision for users to make," he said, "whether they want to take the operational systems they need and put them in the hands of the open source community. I think that debate is ongoing and we are going to keep an eye on it." Also at the press briefing, in response to a question about analytical capabilities across verticals, Camateros announced that Bentley will move "some of the really common analysis functionalities into the XFM designer layer."

I asked Camateros whether, down the line, he saw CAD, GIS, and BIM (building information modeling) merge into a single product. "The answer is yes," he answered. "We definitely think it is merging. It is not Bentley's idea. The response of the OGC to OWS-4, for example, is not something that Bentley promoted; this is something that they got from their sponsors. We are talking about folks like the Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense… Large organizations that have to manage many assets and it did not make much sense to actually have them in different silos. GIS for infrastructure has to be enabled to handle building design."

Vonnie J. Smith, P.E., Director, Electric, Gas, & Communications Products, described Bentley's Geospatial Desktop and Geospatial Server and stressed the integration with Oracle 10g Spatial. She pointed out that the industry solutions—for electric, water, storm, sewer, communications, gas, and district heating—all support XFM persistence workflows, allow Bentley Industry and Expert Designer to work together, and are packaged with Bentley Map and the Geospatial Extension.

Camateros introduced several demonstrations. In one of Geo Web Publisher, I learned that the administrator tool is a fairly "thick" layer: it allows the administrator to control which analysis, reporting, and collaboration tools, as well as what data, users are able to access.

Alain Lapierre, Chief Product Architect, discussed how Bentley users can

• access large raster mosaics from an Oracle spatial database using the GeoRaster support in MicroStation Geospatial Extension Athens
• benefit from the thousands of existing Web map servers using the WMS standard directly in MicroStation Athens
• view and edit intelligent features (such as vectors and attributes) on the Web using the WFS/GML standard directly in MicroStation Geospatial Extension XM
• access a 3D City on the Web by accessing a WFS/CityGML server with Bentley Map Athens and
• share a 3D City with its infrastructures with the public by converting MicroStation data (and other data) into indexed Google Earth data.

The following companies won this year's BE Awards in the geospatial category, announced Monday night during an awards ceremony hosted by National Public Radio's Peter Sagal:

• Geospatial Communications: Nacap Telecom BV, Fibre Optics 'Zuid-Limburg', Isilinx
• Geospatial Government: Gemeente Amsterdam, Dienst Ruimtelijke Ordening, IJburg
• Geospatial Mapping and Cadastre: Petrobras SA, SGO Project Petrobras Subsea Assets Tracking
• Geospatial 3D GIS: AAMHatch, True Orthophotography and 3D Model of the City of Melbourne
• Geospatial Water Resource Management: ISKI Genel Mudurlugu, Infrastructure Integration of Mega City, Istanbul
• Geospatial Utilities: Baltimore Gas & Electric Co., The BGE Bentley Project
• Geospatial Innovation: Dutch Ministry of Finance, Geospatially Enabling the Dutch Ministry of Finance; Putting 'Where' into SAP
• Geospatial Distributed Enterprise: Sandia National Laboratories, Power Through Integration

Full disclosure: Bentley paid for travel and lodging for me to attend the conference.

» Back to our GIS Monitor MAY 2007 Issue