Unforeseen ground conditions are a major cause of delays in construction projects.  This year at the Year in Infrastructure event Bentley announced OpenGround a collection of applications for collecting, sharing, visualizing, analyzing, and accessing geotechnical information about the underground. It has already amassed a database of over 500 thousand boreholes. 

Reports from the National Economic Development Office (NEDO) found that 50% of commercial buildings and 37% of industrial buildings experienced delay due to unforeseen ground conditions.  There are two aspects to the problems associated with the subsurface.  One is geotechnics, soil, ground water, and geology conditions.  The other is the location of underground infrastructure, utilities, telecommunications and other cables and pipes.

Every construction project devotes considerable effort to discovering subsurface geotechnical conditions, but this data is used for the current project and rarely shared.  In the Netherlands an attempt is being made to address the problem by the Key Registry for the Subsurface (BRO) which came into force in January, 2018. The BRO registry ultimately will record 26 data types.  On 1 January 2018,it become mandatory to report the first three data types, geotechnical surveys (CPT), groundwater monitoring wells and soil drilling sample profiles. On 26 June 2018, this data became publicly available via the Dutch open data portal PDOK.

In the UK the Dig to Share project, supported by Atkins, British Geological Survey (BGS) and Morgan Sindall, is addressing this problem. Its aim is to develop a fully digital workflow, which is accessible to the whole industry, to upload and access data from the BGS web-based system. This will be developed on top of the existing system hosted and maintained by BGS. 

Last year Bentley announced the acquisition of Keynetix, a UK-based provider of cloud-based software for capturing, visualizing, modeling, and sharing geotechnical data. This added to Bentley’s products for the subsurface including borehole report management (gINT and HoleBASE) and geotechnical analysis applications (PLAXIS 3D and SoilVision) with which Bentley plans to enable a digital twin of the underground.

This year at the Year in Infrastructure 2019 event in Singapore Roger Chandler, Director of Product Management, GeoTechnical Information Management, announced a new product OpenGround (based on Keynetix.cloud).  OpenGround is a cloud-based SaaS application with a web API that supports real-time logging of subsurface geotechnical data and enables sharing this data over the web.  In the very short time since OpenGround became available it has already amassed a database of over 500 thousand boreholes.