New OGC standard for land and infrastructure information

By Simon Chester on 9 December, 2014

OGC and buildingSMART International have begun developing InfraGML, a new standard for land and infrastructure information.

According to the OGC blog post, after examining the possibility of supporting the LandXML schema within the OGC framework, as well as seeing how to better manage and integrate CAD-based land information with other OGC standards, it was decided that the best plan of action would be to start fresh and develop a new candidate standard – the OGC InfraGML Encoding Standard – that provides a use case driven subset of LandXML functionality, but that is implemented with the OGC Geography Markup Language (GML) and supported by a UML (Unified Modeling Language) conceptual model.

This new standard would:

be supported by a recognised, dependable Standards Developing Organization, OGC
align with existing OGC (and TC211 and SQL/MM) standards, including the OGC modular spec
benefit from functionality already supported by GML, including features, geometry, coordinate reference systems, linear referencing, and surface modeling (TIN)
initially focus on survey, alignments, and land parcels, the subject areas for which there are identified needs and committed resources for development
using modular extensions, be able to expand into other LandXML areas (e.g., pipe networks) as resources become available to develop these extensions
be use-case driven
be based on a UML conceptual model developed prior to the GML encoding (and any other future encodings)
have more up-to-date functionality
be synchronised with the concurrent efforts by buildingSMART in their development of Infrastructure-based Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs)
be more easily integrated with CityGML and TransXML

The OGC Land and Infrastructure Standards Working Group (LandInfraSWG) has begun this work, and very importantly, the work is being done jointly with buildingSMART International, the organization that is actively working on a set of Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs) for Building Information Model (BIM) interoperability.

An OGC/buildingSmart International MOU was signed in March 2014. In coming months a draft conceptual model will be completed and published. Comments will be solicited from the existing LandXML community and others, including users as well as software developers. Comments will be addressed in revisions to the conceptual model before work begins on the GML implementation.