The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced the initiation of a three-phase project to develop interoperability standards for underground infrastructure. The underground infrastructure data interoperability project will take two and a half years to complete and will involve the collaboration of many cities, utilities, and engineering and technology companies.

In the U.S. it is estimated that an underground utility is hit about every minute.  Underground utility conflicts and relocations are the number one cause for project delays during road construction.  Assuming the average cost of underground strikes is roughly $1000 per strike, the estimated total cost to the U.S. economy is $1.5 trillion annually.  Currently, the exchange of underground utility information between infrastructure organizations within the same jurisdiction or in adjacent jurisdictions has been greatly hampered by incompatible and incomplete data. OGC anticipates that this project will make a significant contribution towards facilitating improved information management and secure sharing and collaboration, which should make infrastructure planning, operations & maintenance, and emergency response less costly and time consuming, and more effective.

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has issued a Request for Information (RFI) to inform a Concept Development Study (CDS) that will assess the current state and future direction of information standards for modelling, mapping, and managing underground infrastructure.

The CDS will define the scope of a multi-phase underground infrastructure interoperability project. The purpose of the study is to develop an in-depth understanding of all the components necessary to enable infrastructure data interoperability and standards in an underground environment. The CDS is initially focused on the urban landscape. This RFI is a first step in the CDS process. Any organization with an interest in underground infrastructure is invited to respond to the RFI before 15 March 2017.

This initiative is supported by the Fund for the City of New York, the Singapore Land Authority, the Ordnance Survey and the OGC Innovation Program.