The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and buildingSMART International (bSI) recently held a two day workshop to create a framework to integrate the digital built environment across domains and different aspects of use.

This is a progression of their long standing memorandum of understanding which lays out an intention for collaboration and a common conceptual model.

The intention is to increase usefulness for the user community and to overcome the loss of information in the workflow and over the lifecyle of assets in the built environment.

The delivery of digital data is now seen as important as the delivery of the physical asset and more clients require infrastructure to be supported as a service. For example by delivering and managing an integrated transport network not just “a road”.

The workshop identified the different approaches of OGC & bSI and highlighted the areas for collaboration.

The outcomes are being captured in a White Paper that will act as a joint charter document and lays out the framework model. The joint working group is now formalised and is determining a roadmap to populate the use cases and aspects in the model.