The 1Spatial Conference took place this year at the Ordnance survey in Southampton.  It was an outstanding conference in many ways, one of which was the weather, which was brilliant.  I must admit
that on previous visits to Southampton I experienced what most people expect on the UK seacoast.

The other aspect of the conference that made it outstanding were the folks who attended.  There were barely enough seats in the main auditorium in the OS business centre.  In was great to see so many people that I hadn’t seen for a while including all the folks from 1Spatial, Mike Sanderson, Steven Ramage, Chris Wright, Graham Stickler, Paul Watson, and Chris Tagg.  I was pleasantly surprised to see Ed Parsons, now of Google, Ed Riegelmann from CH2MHill, Kevin Challen from Infotech,  Faisal Al-Tamimi from Saudi Arabia, Peter ter Haar,  Graham Vowles, and Carsten Roensdorf from the OS, Peter Mahan from United Utilities, David Miller from eSpatial, John Hartshorn from Bentley, and many others.  And there were many folks that I met for the first time.  In fact there were so many interesting folks to chat with that it was hard to find time to go to the sessions.  I did manage to hear Ed Parson’s very interesting talk about Google and what Google was doing.  Ed was with the OS until the end of year and just joined Google a month ago or so. Ed always has an interesting perspective on things which you can experience yourself on his blog.

A talk that I also enjoyed was Ed Riegelmann’s presentation on the SDSFIE standard.  If you are not familiar with SDSFIE it is the only really open infrastructure data content standard (it’s actually an ANSI standard) and is designed for use with standard  commercial CAD and GIS packages.  It’s basically a set of infrastructure data models originally designed for military bases (DoD), but because it is nonproprietary it has been adopted in other sectors such as other Federal, State, and local government organizations; public utilities mostly in the US,  but it appears to be showing up outside of the US as well.  It used to be run out of a US Army CAD/GIS centre in Vicksburg and the name I have always associated with it is Harold Smith.   I was uncertain what would happen to SDSFIE after Harold’s departure from Vicksburg, and Ed’s talk alerted me that appears to be new life in SDSFIE.  The “new SDSFIE” has a new web site, which is no longer a .MIL site.   The SDSFIE Steering Group has set itself some new and interesting goals including creating a DoD standard for facilities, infrastructure, environment, and civil works.  It will be interesting to see to what extent non-DoD folks will be encouraged to participate in the process to define a new logical data model.  It will also be interesting to see how SDSFIE relates to the various BIM, CAD and geospatial standards from the IAI, OGC, and NBIM committee.

There appears to be an opportunity for input from the community so I would encourage folks who have used SDSFIE data models in the past or who are interested in open data models to take a look at the new SDSFIE site.