Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1
Feature data life cycle
Anyway, together with the companies Iver from Spain, Vianova Systems Finland
Oy, Norkart and Vianova Systems from Norway we applied and got the grant
from the Norwegian Research Council. About 4.0 M Euro for a new virtual world
approach aimed at infrastructure data hence the project title InfraWorld. Prior to
the InfraWorld project the GMO concept was used on a couple of smaller pro-
jects, which clearly showed potential, but it was not possible to go any further
with the concept at that state due to the lack of a working platform (Kjems and
Bodum
2009
).
The main motivation for the commercial partners was the ability to get more
out of the data produced during the design and construction phases of an infra-
structure project. For project owners the main motivation has always been to avoid
additional costs due to redundant data and paying for the creation of several inde-
pendent models used in parallel by different domains. Both motivations can be
united in one coherent approach. Steps in this direction can also be observed in
the building and construction area where for instance the (Industrial Foundation
Classes) IFC standard has moved the whole sector from using simple spatial
geometry to a rich object oriented representation of the building. Creating virtual
city models (VCM) is quite costly although prices have dropped tremendously
over the past decade, and even though the list of different applications using these
city models is remarkable (Batty et al.
2000
; Kolbe and Gröger
2003
), the real use,
calculated as share of created professional city models, is rather modest. The lack
of usability and costs of city models can quickly make the originally enthusiasm
fade away. Probably therefore the growths rate of virtual city models is slowly but
steadily declining (Morton et al.
2012
).
The InfraWorld project took its origin in a planning
→
design
→
construc-
tion
→
maintenance phase organized process. The idea now is to be able to not
only reuse data produced during the phases, but also to let the data be part of
future designs, for maintenance, and other purposes. In that case the phase dia-
gram gets a product life circle shape shown in Fig.
1
.
Until recently project data were put away in closets in the form of printed
paper. Digital project data were stored away on tapes or discs not really meant
