We’re happy to have Steve Grise of Vertex3 guest post this month. When we typically think of GIS, we think of our external environment. Steve is here to make the case from an internal point of view.

Historically there have been significant technical obstacles to managing GIS data in 3D, and most utilities have developed systems that avoided managing data inside of buildings.

The technology has now matured to the point that you should consider managing Interior Space data as part of your GIS implementation.

In the last several years, the University Facilities Management community has been working to manage Interior Spaces with GIS.

These organizations are particularly challenged with space planning and campus safety requirements that have driven their Interior Space GIS projects.

What has emerged is a clear pattern where Floorplan drawings are managed in CAD in 2D, and Sync processes are developed to populate 3D GIS databases. This lets the Facilities Management staff in organizations continue to do their work with automated Floorplan-based GIS capabilities for the rest of the organization.

At the University of Washington in Seattle, for example, drawings are updated with quality control in AutoCAD.

In the picture above, note that the Rooms (RMS) are a CAD feature class with attributes. The important attribute is the ROOM_NUMBER – all rooms need an identifier, and CAD is the source for this information.

You don’t have to use ArcGIS for AutoCAD, but experience says that it’s better to build and QC the source data in CAD, and it’s tricky to get those room numbers if it is not an attribute of the CAD features.

The system essentially creates geometry and identity for interior space data, and the result is an Enterprise Facilities Data Platform that can be used for many purposes.

The key enabling technology is the Sync Engine process that picks up any changed drawings, transforms the data to the target data model, and performs quality control on the updates in a staging database.

If everything for the drawing completes successfully, the Sync process performs change detection and updates the main cad-sde database with updated floorplan data.

Along the way several derived datasets are created that enable sophisticated use of the floorplan data in ArcGIS. This includes:

• Floorplans are rotated correctly on screen and on paper. Data-Driven pages are used to support floor-aware ArcGIS Desktop applications for analysis and printing of space data by floor
• GIS data can be managed on top of the floorplans and correctly located in the building with the correct elevation
• Many views in 2D and 3D can easily be constructed with the latest GIS tools

Of course the data can also be used in Floor-Aware applications in ArcGIS Server web applications, and recent developments in Esri technology are enabling Interior Space applications in new ways.

If you have been paying attention to the buzz on next-generation Utility Networks from Esri, you can probably see the next step – interior assets and network tracing. Universities are commercial businesses are already doing this with network datasets and applications that provide room to room routing.

The UW app is being developed by Geometri – a startup company from long-time Esri Partner GIS Inc.

As users navigate through the directions the application turns on relevant floorplans – for UW students it’s the ‘No More Tears’ application on a giant 20M+ square ft campus.

The results are compelling, and GIS is quickly being adopted for use by Facilities Management professionals to augment their existing solutions to better manage their real estate and building portfolio.

It’s a big business that is often hidden inside of most organizations, but the budgets and asset value for these business areas are resulting in significant value from GIS applications.

In most organizations there is a group that is already managing the floorplan drawings, so the cost of entry can be relatively low, and solutions can be implemented in a few months in most cases.

The Gizinta Sync Engine for Floorplans is freely available on Github. It’s built with familiar ArcGIS arcpy and Safe Software FME technologies, and it’s easy to set up and configure for your drawings.