OGC Underground Infrastructure Concept Study Engineering Report

For any hope of having an impact on how infrastructure information is captured, structured, stored, shared and used, it is essential to have an understanding of the various organizations that play important roles in owning, managing, and regulating underground assets.

Who is responsible for the data ?

The parties responsible for collecting and curating data about the underground environment can be grouped into some general categories. There is inevitably some overlap between the categories.

The status of the parties is variable they can be central or local government bodies, quasi-government bodies or commercial companies. Their drivers are inevitably different and generally reflect their role or status.

Asset Operator

Asset operators include bodies responsible for the supply of services such as water supply and disposal, electricity, gas, heating (for example steam) and telecommunications. Additionally, there are parties who manage transport networks that will have data about their infrastructure such as tunnels, stations, ventilation shafts, access points and so on as well as the roads and rail lines themselves. There are also organizations responsible for environmental management or protection, such as surface water drainage, flood prevention, public open space management and so on who will have data about underground assets to assist them in their activities.

Examples from the RFI include US Highway Authorities with 3D inventories and the Dubai government department responsible for electricity. Of note in the RFI, with the exception of Dubai, individual asset operators were not represented directly as participants.

Data supplier

Data suppliers in the underground environment as a purely commercial activity are not a common element. The costs of data capture and maintenance mean that the data entry costs are high if no specific users have been identified. Bodies such as the British Geological Survey (BGS) and BRGM (Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières – French Geological Survey) collect and freely distribute relatively low resolution sub-surface geological data, though they also provide some higher-resolution data on a fee basis. Organizations such as Ordnance Survey collect surface topographic or land-base data which is used to register and depict underground assets.

These organizations are also commonly data collators and will also work on project-based activities using their expertise and knowledge to deliver more precise content where demand exists (see below).

Data collator

Data collators combine data from different sources for conflation as a potential commodity or as a ‘public’ service.

Parties may combine data, often from disparate sources, to create content data that has more value, for example assembling borehole data, contaminated land, mining records, and surface data to create a model that can be owned. In these cases the data may be used to provide a service such as liability to subsidence for land and property. Responsibility for this combined data is likely to lie with the collator. As part of the RFI Columbia University, BRGM, and BGS outlined this type of approach.

In other cases the collator will not own the data but combine it to offer a service. For example the KLIP service in Flanders and KLIC service in the Netherlands combine and supply data to users to reduce conflicts when excavations are planned. In these collation services responsibility for the data still tends to sit with the asset owners. Such services are necessarily provided to the collator with caveats related to quality. Other services such as Dig Safe in New England and Call Before you Dig in Connecticut provide in essence a reverse collation service, by collating and distributing individual excavation notices to the utilities so they can respond without contributing their data.

Data collation services were quite prominent in the RFI responses, for example KLIP, CityGML – Rotterdam, ASK (BGS) and NUAG (Les Guest).

Another type of data collator would be public bodies charged with emergency responses such as those highlighted by University of Munich and New York City. In these examples the conflated data would need to be tested against the identified use cases but is not likely to be shared outside the government body, though findings and recommendations from analysis may be.

Project based

Project based actors are bodies that have a requirement to collect information for a specific project. They tend to capture data to a very high level of detail and quality in accordance with the CI/ASCE 38-02 Standard Guidelines for the Collection and Depiction of Existing Subsurface Utility Data, an engineering standard that raises the utility investigation activity to a professional effort akin to a geotechnical investigation or property boundary land survey, in which a licensed professional certifies the submittal. This costs of capture are typically small compared to the budget for a construction project, and the return on investment is typically on the order of 2 to 10 times the cost. For example UMS Berenice highlights recent light rail projects at the Los Angeles International Airport and in Honolulu.

At a different level, the City of Boston require conduits for broadband fiber to be installed and design / as-built data to be submitted whenever new street work projects take place. Another type of project based capture was highlighted in the submission from New York where commercial companies gather borehole data as part of actual and potential development activities.

It is likely that the ownership of the detailed data will lie with the construction project. However, in the case of the New York geo-technical boring data, it was reported that the companies who capture the data will tend to view it as valuable for use in future projects as it provides information not available to rival companies.

In comparison to mapping the above ground an obvious difference arises. In most cases the asset owner is responsible for the data about their asset and it many cases it is the only record. For above ground there are commonly bodies that collect at least a framework of shareable content, for example mapping or city authorities. If this approach was continued above ground it would be akin expecting the individual property owners, the highway authority, the river authority and so on to all capture data about their area of interest and then share it hoping to make a seamless dataset.

Land Administration

An additional type of responsibility is for registration of ownership or other rights, highlighted by the Singapore Land Authority and Erik Stubkjær. In this case a body, likely to be public, may be recording the location of the ownership or other rights below ground level. There are related uses where some local authorities require knowledge of basements and similar structures for planning, taxation and risk assessment. The correlation with other data may be variable. Land Administration systems also record easements, the right to cross or otherwise use someone’s land for underground utility purposes.

Singapore Land Authority for example report that landowners hold title to the land surface and to 30 m of depth from the Singapore Height Datum below that; everything deeper than 30 m from the SHD belongs to the State. In addition the government can acquire additional underground strata when developing public projects.

What makes a party own the data – running their business, legislation, best practice, benefits

Asset operators

Asset operators originally captured data on paper records, as described by Les Guest for UK and by Munich University for the City of Rotterdam. The driver was for the operator to be able to maintain and extend their services by knowing what assets they had and where they were located. Paper maps do not readily lend themselves to three dimensional representation and anyone combining the data from different operators in crowded areas would struggle with simply overlaying the maps physically. As data became increasingly digital then paper records were digitized to benefit from reduced costs of storage and longevity issues with paper records. This allowed data to be readily overlain but the source data quality limitations generally remain.

From RFI and experience in the UK it would seem that the main drivers for ‘business as usual’ data ownership is to capture only enough information to allow the asset owner to conduct their normal activity. Evidence for data improvements driven by the asset owners was not widespread from the RFI though the benefits were recognized. EPRI reported https://www.epri.com/#/pages/product/1024303/ that GIS data for underground assets is commonly not updated as changes occur in the real world as the team undertaking the work rarely consider themselves to be a data owner. EPRI report only 46% of respondents report significant benefits from high quality data, similarly only 15% reporting repercussions of poor data suggesting a perceived lack of benefit. Additional requirements may be created by those with a more holistic view where the main aim of is to facilitate data sharing and reduce accidental strikes; for example KLIP in Flanders, KLIC in Netherland, ASK in Glasgow, and so on.

Local standards do exist, for example in Switzerland for water (Robin Dainton) and Streetworks legislation in UK. However is most cases the operator is not required to enhance existing data due to the costs of capture/improvement. From the RFI responses there is little evidence of utility providers actively seeking to improve their data for internal operational reasons such as efficiency or best practice beyond that required by statute or contract.

Data supplier

Data suppliers in the underground environment, as evidenced by the RFI responses, tend to capture, collate, and distribute sub-surface geological data at a relatively low resolution. A proposal to periodically capture and monitor the NYC sub-surface was mentioned at the workshop; however, the costs of capture, if not driven by project, particular risk or asset owner, are likely to discourage enhanced or repeated capture. The national geological bodies are likely to have a mandate to maintain a national level of coverage, however the rates of change at this resolution are almost nil. The costs of capture at locally detailed levels are likely to be too high for wholesale capture to take place. This contrasts with the increasing availability of high-resolution surface topographic reference data.

Data collator

Data collators will conflate data from different sources to offer a service. For example Columbia University, BRGM, and BGS combine disparate subsurface sources into data that has value. This can be on a wholly commercial basis as a product, including services, that is sold or as part of some type of ‘public task’. For example data such as contaminated land or mining records may have to be made available.

For strike avoidance initiatives the collation can be voluntary and funded by the utility community; leading to distributed notification systems such as Dig Safe in New England and Call Before you Dig in Connecticut. Alternatively they can be mandated in legislation like the KLIP and KLIC programs in The Netherland and Flanders or the permit system implemented in Dubai and proposed for Chicago. They can also be implemented through contracts whereby a requirement is for an as-built survey to be provided once work in complete.

Collation for emergency responses is likely to be led by the Government bodies responsible for identifying risks, planning and responding. How the data is sourced did not emerge from the RFI.

Project based

Project based actors are bodies that have a requirement to collect information for a specific project. The data is required to plan and monitor a project. It is expected that the data belongs to the commissioning party and that is usually handed over to the operating body when a project is complete. Informal discussions in the UK would suggest that initial the high quality of data is not always maintained as changes occur after the initial completion of the project.

In other cases, such as those identified in New York, core borehole data typically gathered for one project is regarded as a valuable asset. This data is held by the companies that have collected it as it is costly to source and is expected to be reusable on future projects in such a dense urban area.

Land Registration

Land registration bodies are there to "Protect property ownership rights" as reported by Singapore Land Authority in addition to supporting decision making and planning. Singapore Land Authority described how two-dimensional plans have been converted to three-dimensional data.

Data is likely to created and shared as ownership is claimed or as projects are delivered that require ownership or other stakeholders to be established. This could be new construction where private ownership wishes to obtain security of tenure or driven by an infrastructure project in public ownership.

How do the stakeholders relate- licensee/licensor, competitor, govt, supplier?

Asset operators

The asset operators may be in direct competition with one another, for example rival telecommunications operators. Asset operators may also be in competition for space in the real world to place their infrastructure. This may create some reluctance to share data, this was hard to identify from the RFI due to the lack of responses from utility operators. Government can have a role to play is it is likely to license operators to allow them to use public thoroughfares to route assets and in return demand they make their data available to other stakeholders. The KLIP and KLIC initiatives are good examples of this where the aim is to avoid utility strikes by mandating data sharing. There are similar but different versions of this approach around the world, for example in the UK the focus is on minimizing traffic disruption by mandating permits to excavate the pubic highway. Typically permits to dig are volunteered or mandated that alert utilities and traffic management bodies to possible activity and allow them to either supply data, to visit the ground to mark up assets or (ideally) to combine collocated works projects.

The asset owners are typically private companies and the costs of data capture and improvement are significant. In the UK regulation is fragmented across sectors and there is little appetite to impose additional costs that would be passed onto consumers either by sector or across all the asset operators.

The asset operators will supply data to the data collators either through self-interest or to meet statutory requirements. They may also consume data from these collators as part of their day to day activity to plan activity better and to reduce the chance of strikes.

If ownership of the sub-surface becomes an issue then bodies will engage with Land Administration bodies. To a certain extent the identification of who 'owns' a street is a light version of this.

Data supplier

Data suppliers in the underground environment, as evidenced by the RFI responses, tend to supply data at a level they have either been mandated to do by government and/or at a level where they can realize some return. They can also respond to specific projects, government or private sector led. There appears to be little demand from asset operators for soil/geology data; however the soil/geology community appear to be more pro-active in seeking out the asset owners for collaborations, for example the ASK project in Glasgow, Project Iceberg in the UK, and Columbia University in New York.

Data collator

Data collators will necessarily interact with asset owners, data suppliers to source the data required. The supply of data may be required in a contract, a statutory requirement or supplied out of self-interest (to reduce strikes or help with emergency response). In many cases the asset owners will also be customers of the data collator, for example strike avoidance services.

Project based

Project based actors will have a more ad hoc relationship with the other types of party. They may source data from them with a view to assessing and if necessary improving it or they may choose to recapture it entirely to a new standard, for example the Los Angeles airport World Airport Automated People Mover project described by UMS Berenice.

Land Registration

Land registration bodies are likely to interact with Asset owners when they want to create initial records of ownership and stakeholders and will offer a service to all of the other parties when their activities

Data is likely to created and shared as ownership is claimed or as projects are delivered that require ownership or other stakeholders to be established. This could be new construction where private ownership wishes to obtain security of tenure or driven by an infrastructure project in public ownership.

In the vast majority of jurisdictions, utilities are completely buried underground and must be excavated in order to be serviced; only in rare instances have large, easily accessible underground vaults been built to contain infrastructure networks. In almost any urban or suburban street in every developed country there may be five, six, seven or even more different types of utility networks providing services including water, sewer, gas, district heating, electric power, telecommunications and transit.

There are many work processes that depend upon prompt access to accurate and current underground infrastructure information. Sub-optimal access often leads to significant inefficiencies and outright risks to health and safety. The following is a review of major use cases that interact with and depend upon infrastructure information. In each accompanying case study it is demonstrated that major benefits can result when utilities adopt data and operating practices that facilitate effective data integration and rapid access. A key observation is that data organized according to standardized, geospatially-enabled data models enables one version of information from multiple utilities and utility networks to be interoperable, i.e. to be exchanged and combined readily to address a variety of both expected and unexpected uses and applications.

The above use cases and case studies illustrate how improved and interoperable underground infrastructure data can have significant impacts in six major facets of urban life. Representatives from Flanders, Belgium to the OGC Underground Infrastructure Workshop, held in New York City in April, presented a particularly compelling case study of how Flanders is meeting its underground utility data challenges with an established and successful standards-based data integration program.

Flanders, Belgium
In 2004 a large gas transmission line in Ghislenghien was damaged due to excavation activities. The pipeline began to leak gas which led to an explosion that killed 24 people and injured more than 120, many of them badly burned.

Following this accident, Flanders initiated a single-point-of-access system that required the 300 utilities operating in the region to share their data whenever a request for an excavation was submitted. From 2011, Flanders took it a step further and started the “KLIP Digital” project to mandate that all utilities create accurate digital drawings and associated attribute data in conformance with a common model (IMKL, an information model on cables and pipes), which is an extension of the INSPIRE utility network data standard. INSPIRE data models were designed so that all utilities could register their utility information to a common set of data layers. Data from the different utilities could then interoperate and be exchanged and combined seamlessly. The IMKL extension of INSPIRE made interoperability practical, by refining the model to meet the regional requirements of the Flemish utility sector and excavation businesses.

Five years later, in January 2016, Flanders implemented the digital phase of the KLIP system that largely automates the process of bringing utility data together to support excavation operations. A central utility information clearinghouse receives excavation requests, identifies the utilities active in the area and sends them the outline of an area excerpted from their basemap. Utilities excerpt the appropriate portion of their infrastructure map and send it back to the clearinghouse which brings the information together and sends it to the requestor of the excavation. Access to the KLIP system and its Web API is tightly secured and authenticated to protect both information privacy and integrity. As noted above, significant time and financial savings have been realized so far, and the number of insurance claims has been substantially reduced.