Ordnance Survey to support Singapore

Ordnance Survey International (OSI) has been contracted to support project lead the National University of Singapore and the Singapore Government with its continued vision to be a Smart Technology world leader. The two-year project will address the automation challenge of converting IFC-BIM, which is building and construction industry data, into CityGML, an open standardised data model and exchange format that stores digital 3D models of cities and landscapes.

The automated conversion to be developed in this project is expected to reduce costs in creating and updating semantically enriched 3D city models. The primary objective is the development of a methodology and algorithms that automate the conversion of IFC-BIM models into CityGML building models while ensuring complete and near-lossless mapping.

James Crawford, Ordnance Survey technical product manager, will be based in Singapore working on the project. He says that one of the first steps towards achieving the vision is through the continued investment and development of digital standards. Standards play an important piece of this puzzle, because standards are an effective means to removing ‘barriers’ – i.e. they enable and support a common understanding across domain groups, industry sectors and organisations. Without first establishing a common set of tools, language and technologies, the actors in these different systems cannot collaborate (i.e. cross those ‘barriers’) or at least to a level that will be necessary in order to achieve this vision.