There is little doubt that innovations in GPS, GIS, CAD, and the internet provide professionals in the land development industry with opportunities for added efficiencies and cost savings.

The challenge comes when deciding whether to be an early adopter of the technology or risk falling behind competitors and watching from the sidelines.

While technological innovations have been virtually continuous over the past two decades, activity within the past 6-12 months has resulted in a whirlwind of advances. One of the newest results has been the convergence of multiple technologies into single products.

Where Are You At Today?
If you work in this industry and are not utilizing digital or electronic technology beyond a cell phone and email, either you need to obtain some immediate technological assistance or you may want to retire.

This does not imply that you need the latest and greatest technology or even that you need to be within an arm’s reach of a computer at all times. But the reality is that communication is one of the most important ingredients in achieving a successful land development project.

It is essential that professionals realize that phone and personal communication cannot be abandoned in favor of emails, Blackberrys, PDAs, memory sticks, and file sharing.

As Simple As PDF
While almost everyone is familiar with PDFs, there have been advancements within the past six months that will likely impact the land development industry.

In January, Adobe Systems, the company responsible for Acrobat and the PDF technology, released Acrobat 3D, which allows a person to create a PDF file with embedded images from computer-aided design (CAD) applications.

More importantly, it will allow architects and engineers to share 3D CAD files in PDF format, which means – assuming they upgrade to the latest free version – that the 1.2 million users of the free Acrobat Reader could be exposed to 3D design files without the need to have an expensive CAD software program.

Acrobat 3D extends the electronic base design collaboration to include 3D information as well. It is a “superset” of Acrobat 7 Professional, which is the product for the AEC market. However, those AEC professionals who use 3D quite extensively who want to exchange content beyond the core design team will find value with this product.

The first and most obvious method for capturing 3D data in a PDF file is through file format conversion. Acrobat 3D can read an impressive variety of CAD/CAM/DCC files, including 3DS, 3DM, ASE, DXF, DGN, IGES, OBJ and VRML. This method preserves additional information such as model hierarchy, part names and metadata and does not require you to run or own the authoring application.

Adobe Acrobat 3D’s second approach to acquiring 3D content from Manufacturing, AEC and BIM (building, information, modeling) applications which support the OpenGL rendering mode might surprise you. Acrobat 3D allows you to capture the data stream which contains the model’s description in OpenGL from an application running in the background by hitting the “Print Screen” key. So if you don’t have access to the 3D CAD file or if the file format is not supported, Acrobat 3D can retrieve the geometry information.

Acrobat 3D runs only on Windows. For Unix applications, Adobe supplies an Acrobat 3D Capture Utility (for Sun Solaris 2.8, IBM AIX 5.2, HP-UX 11 and SGI Irix 6.5) on the second CD. Mac OS X is currently not supported.

Like always, 3D PDF files can be combined with other documents such as email, web documentation, spreadsheets and insert 3D CAD designs into Word, Excel or PowerPoint files and use Acrobat 3D to convert them into PDF. Advanced security controls are also provided in Acrobat 3D, with password protection that restricts access, printing, editing and other actions.

As Easy as Google Earth
When Google announced its ability to offer online public views of the Earth – and your neighborhood – from a satellite last June, its popularity among consumers was not a real surprise. However, the intense interest and quick acceptance it generated from the business community was not widely expected.

Google Earth is easy to use. Better yet, the basic version is free. Google Earth Plus is $20 annually and includes GPS importing and other useful features. There is also Google Earth Pro, a $400-per-year version tuned for research, presentation, and other commercial uses. And, for companies that want to deploy Google Earth on-site, there is Google Earth Enterprise.

The software’s diverse use is somewhat surprising. It evolved from software created by satellite data company Keyhole, founded in 2001 and bought by Google in 2004.

Engineers in the CAD design industry, which can already utilize PDF technology with software from widely-used Bentley Systems’ products, can now further their client-satisfaction services. Bentley has taken MicroStation and connected it to Google Earth, so that users will be able to navigate high resolution 2D and 3D models of infrastructure in the Google Earth environment.

This integration offers a way to effectively combine CAD and GIS data to enable reliable contextual decisions. In a media demonstration, Joe Croser, global marketing director of Bentley platform products, illustrated a view of the Bentley Exton facility with the model showing the impact of 2D, 3D, civil and GIS information.

To use Google Earth Tools, Croser first opened the published file inside of Google Earth, then zoomed in to see the imagery provided by Google Earth. You can also see the MicroStation 2D, civil and utilities information overlaying that imagery. If you zoom in closer you can see some text and links, and can see how the high resolution raster image that came attached to the reference file within MicroStation has been transferred along with the model, along with the hyperlink and the civil and GIS data, to be incorporated with the image data in Google Earth.

Saved views in MicroStation are also published to the Google Earth environment, so that you can turn on and of level information, turn on and off reference files to be able to see the additional information that was first added to MicroStation and later published to the Google Earth environment.

Features of MicroStation Geographics coordinate systems are exported to the correct locations in Google Earth. Raster references can be added to DGN and DWG files and be published in the KML format within the Google Earth environment. MicroStation levels are also transferred to the KML file as are the saved views in MicroStation to make it easier to move around to pre-defined positions.

“Very importantly, url links in MicroStation are published as Google Earth placemarks so it means that we really can treat the model that has been initially prepared in MicroStation and publish to Google Earth as a fabulously rich and intuitive graphical environment for navigating models, finding other extended pieces of information and being able to communicate that to a wider audience, and make far more informed design decisions about projects in their context.”

In late March, Autodesk, Inc. joined the party and launched Autodesk Civil 3D 2007, Autodesk Map 3D 2007, and Autodesk Raster Design 2007 software products. These new solutions enable the integration of CAD and GIS data allowing customers to create, manage, and share valuable spatial information.

Earlier in the year Autodesk announced its acquisition of Constructware. One of the noted upcoming changes is that Autodesk plans to make significant investments in supporting, enhancing, and integrating the Constructware ASP solution with Autodesk’s Collaborative Project Management solutions, including Buzzsaw, Revit and Civil 3D.

Not to be left out, architects are being intrigued by Google’s March acquisition of @Last Software, a company known to CAD users as an easy-to-use 3D design tool. It had also recently entered the GIS market. Plans for the integration of the company’s product, SketchUp, with Google have not been announced yet, but expect the implications to be revolutionary.

Putting Things In Their Place
The market leader in GIS, ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, provide the backbone for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. ESRI is the only vendor that provides complete technical solutions for desktop, mobile, server, and Internet platforms.

According to media reports and press releases, ESRI’s ArcGIS 9.2 software – a major introduction of new functionality and server-based architecture – will contribute to development of the organizations next major offering, GeoWeb. A distributed network of GIS services, GewWeb will describe many aspects of geography and workflows, including better cartography, data management, modeling, temporal GIS, and new tools for accessing GIS functionality across the Web.

In addition, ESRI expects to introduce a free viewing technology called ArcGIS Explorer and Image Server in 2006. ArcGIS Explorer promises to support a new way for GIS users to share and access GIS services of all types. Image Server will provide on-the-fly image processing by simultaneously processing and distributing images in a Web services environment.  SLDT