OGC seeks comment on land and infrastructure standard

The membership of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) seeks public comment on its candidate OGC Land and Infrastructure Conceptual Model Standard (LandInfra). Deadline for comments is March 2.

LandInfra defines concepts for land and civil engineering infrastructure facilities.This conceptual standard will provide a basis for one or more implementation standards for encoding infrastructure data. Developers will use the encoding standard to implement software and services that enable users of diverse technologies and vendor platforms to efficiently exchange information about land and civil engineering infrastructure facilities.

The extended stakeholder community for this standard spans civil engineering (such as road and rail) and surveying; land parcel; facility and asset management; and government information communities. It is applicable throughout the entire facility lifecycle, including planning, design, construction, operations, maintenance, and removal. It represents a seminal venture into GIS-CAD-BIM integration.

After evaluating the LandXML 1.2 schema, the OGC Land and Infrastructure Domain Working Group (LandInfraDWG) recommended the development of an alternative standard to be part of the OGC standards baseline. With shared interest by the buildingSMART International Infrastructure Room, it was agreed that this would be a concepts-only document — encodings such as GML, IFC, and possibly others would follow as separate implementation standardization efforts. An anticipated GML encoding will be compatible with other GML standards such as CityGML. Having a common underlying Conceptual Model across all LandInfra encodings will help ensure compatibility across multiple encoding standards.

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 515 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled.