Can all underground utilities be integrated into a single infrastructure map ?

The vision of a single map showing all underground utilities and communications infrastructure is shared by many who are involved in planning, engineering and construction and those developing digital twins. But in many jurisdictions there are obstacles standing in the way of achieving this goal. The source of most of underground utility location data is utility and communications network owners/operators as-builts, typically recorded in a GIS. Historically each utility has developed and customized a data model, vocabulary, symbology, projection, base map, standards for layout, and data protection guidelines that are unique to each utility. This makes integrating underground utility data from different utility and communications organizations a challenge, and in some jurisdictions may actually prevent the development of a single underground infrastructure map, at least in the short term.

The Scottish Vault system is illustrative of how a single infrastructure map can be achieved for an entire nation. A number of years ago Scotland embarked on developing a nation-wide collaborative system for sharing information about the location of underground infrastructure among stakeholders involved in road construction including roads authorities, utility and telecom network owners/operators, and Transport Scotland. The Vault system was implemented by the Scottish road works community on a voluntary basis in 2012.

The Scottish Community Apparatus Data Vault (Vault) is intended to make underground asset information accessible to excavators participating in the Scottish Road Works Register (SRWR. he Vault system was developed to provide a single map showing the location of all underground utility and communications infrastructure. At the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) underground standards (MUDDI) meeting this week , Iain Ross, in the Office of the Scottish Road Works Commissioner, demonstrated the Vault system and explained how the goal of a single, common infrastructure map has been achieved.

The obstacles that had to be overcome were the result of each utility having a different data model, vocabulary, symbology, projection, base map, standards for layout, and data protection guidelines. The way the Vault system addressed this challenge was by adopting an evolutionary, adaptive approach rather than an upfront prescriptive process. As each new utility or telecom elected to join the Vault system, the network owner and the Vault team would work in a collaborative environment to map the utility’s data on to Vault’s evolving basic model, simplified symbology and vocabulary. Once this fundamental mapping was done, whenever new data arrived (data is refreshed every two months), it can be brought into the Vault system using an automated ETL process.

But a fundamental reason that all utility location data could be integrated onto a single map in Scotland is that (thanks to Napoleon) the UK has a tremendous advantage – everyone in the UK uses a common basemap, the Ordnance Survey MasterMap. This is in contrast to other jurisdictions such as North America, where in general each utility will have mapped its facilities on a different basemap.

In North America basemaps are available commercially from different sources , such as TomTom (Tele Atlas), NOKIA (NAVTEQ), HERE,and ESRI. Some utilities have even created their own basemaps. If two basemaps from different sources are overlaid, variations in the location of topographic features such as road centrelines and buildings can be detected. The process of migrating infrastructure location data from one base map to another, referred to as “conflation”, is time consuming, labor intensive, and generally results in poorer quality (relative) infrastructure location data. This has inhibited utilities from attempting to adopt and migrate to a new basemap.

Another obstacle to integrating data from different utilities is the ubiquitous problem of data for which the projection is unknown. Sometimes the projection was never known, but frequently the metadata containing the projection information is missing.

Data protection is an important concern for utilities sharing data with other utilities. Most underground utility data is owned by private companies, typically gas, electric power, and communications companies, but also investor owned water and wastewater companies. Sharing data raises different sensitivities in different contexts and utility companies require a legal data sharing agreement before they allow their data to be seen by others outside the company. Communications companies are particularly sensitive to who has access to their data and how their data is accessed because communications is an extremely competitive industry. Communications owners/operators will not countenance participating in a system that would allow a competitor to see the extent of its fibre network. A widely implemented data protection measure is limiting the geographic size of each query, for example to 500 m by 500 m. In the Scottish Vault system, utility and communications infrastructure is only visible at small scales making viewing any network at large scale impossible. Another data protection measure is journaling or logging queries in order detect and identify a user attempting to to compile a large scale view of a network by conducting a large number of small scale queries over a large geographic area.

There are several obstacles can inhibit the development of a single map integrating all underground utilities, but as the Scottish Vault system has demonstrated, many of them can be surmounted in a collaborative environment.

This information was first published on https://geospatial.blogs.com/geospatial/2020/12/implementing-a-shared-single-map-system-for-underground-utilities.html