BIM and GIS in My Inbox

While it was all good, exhausting fun to be on the road for most of March, it has been a welcome change to be back home again for a few weeks to recharge and renew and to at least attempt to get caught up on all that email that piled up while I wasn’t looking.

In that stack of email, I found some great reading, particularly on the BIM and GIS front. Stu Rich’s recent post about GIS complementing BIM for facilities management clearly states the case for the value that a GIS perspective can bring into the ongoing operations of buildings, particularly since this *long* phase of a building’s life has a different set of needs for an information model than the important but relatively short creation phase. As Stu succinctly and correctly sums up:

… GIS does not replace nor compete with either CAD or BIM. Rather, GIS is used in an interoperable way to harvest information from a variety of data sources to create systems that perform well at large geographic scales and yet linked back to the source systems when highly detailed information is necessary for specific requirements.

This conclusion absolutely lines up with the experiences I’ve heard from FME users who are forging the way ahead in this exciting new application area for GIS.

And elsewhere in my email was the program for the upcoming 2010 ESRI Southeast Regional User Group (SERUG) Conference in Charlotte, NC. SERUG has a very interesting talk by Gary Siorek of VISTAtsi on the Impact of BIM Tools on GIS that I’d dearly love to hear. You can read the full abstract in this PDF, but it promises to be a great introduction to the formats and issues involved in bringing data from a variety of BIM-ish sources into the GIS arena to solve a host of real-world business problems. Sounds like it would be a talk very relevant for those who may be interested in taking advantage of our recent push to bring the power of FME and the Data Interop Extension to BIM/3D/GIS data exchange problems.

Sadly for me though, while SERUG is underway I’ll be in Phoenix for GITA (touted as being “Not My Father’s GIS Conference” – by then he should have his first computer, a Canadian-purchased iPad, and will be able to decide for himself) and the Oracle Spatial User Conference. But the good news is, if Stu’s DOPPLR sidebar is to be believed, he’ll be in Phoenix too and we can talk some BIM and GIS during the breaks in play at a Coyote’s playoff game, all the while wishing we were back at home, catching up on email…