InfraGML is the proposed Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Geographic Markup Language (GML)  application schema supporting land development and civil engineering infrastructure facilities. The OGC has just released the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model, the first draft of the InfraGML conceptual model for land parcels and the built environment.  The document was submitted by Bentley Systems, Inc, Leica Geosystems, Trimble, Australian Government Department of Communications, Autodesk, Vianova Systems AS, and buildingSMART International.

LandXML is a widely used existing standard supported by almost 800 members in the roads and highway transportation sector.  It is intended that the new InfraGML standard will support a subset of the LandXML standard including alignment, road, rail, survey, terrain, land parcels, drainage, wastewater, and water distribution systems.

The main motivating issues for InfraGML are that LandXML is not associated with a recognized international standards organization, was not supported for a number of years though LandXML.org has become active again, lacked a UML model, and in its present form LandXML 1.2 is not compliant with the OGC’s GML standard for geographic location.  (A number of years ago an attempt was made to make LandXML compliant with GML.) To address these issues the OGC’s  Land and Infrastructure DWG chartered a LandInfraSWG (Standards Working Group) for LandXML. Its first activity was to reverse-engineer a UML model and documentation (which were lacking) for LandXML 1.2 as a basis for assessing the viability of supporting LandXML as an OGC interoperability standard. A number of deficiencies relative to the OGC baseline were identified.

The LandinfraSWG decided that to be able to support LandXML as an interoperability standard, it would be necessary to fix the problems that had been identified.  But it felt that for a number of reasons this would be difficult to do. The LandInfraSWG therefore proposed developing a new standard that would encompass a subset of LandXML functionality.  

The new standard would be called InfraGML and would be supported by the OGC. It would align with existing OGC, TC211 and SQL/MM standards such as GML. Its focus would be alignments/roads, survey, and land parcels, but would be able to expand into other areas as resources became available. It was to be use-case driven and based on a UML conceptual model. It would also synchronize with the concurrent efforts by buildingSMART International in its development of infrastructure-based Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs), for example, for alignments, as well as with CityGML and TransXML.

The first public draft of the OGC’s proposed UML conceptual model for land parcels and the built environment has been released for public comment.  The OGC has issued a Request for Comments on the first draft of the OGC LandInfra Conceptual Model.