Wellington Water manage drinking water, stormwater and wastewater services in the Wellington region. As-Built drawings are used to show the location and details of existing or new services and typically concentrate on underground services; stormwater, water and sewer.
The Background
Wellington Water manage drinking water, stormwater and wastewater services in the Wellington region.
With a philosophy for continuous improvement, Wellington Water has focused on the automation of data capture and transfer to their Asset Management Systems. This centre of interest has resulted in a review not only of their Regional Standards & Specifications for Water Services but also the Regional As-Built and Drafting Specifications.
In reviewing not only documents but also the process of receiving as-builts drawings and other asset data and information, a key outcome was to examine Wellington Water’s Asset Management System (AMS), key shareholders (Councils) and internal customers to define the Asset Attributes used to Operate, Maintain, Model and Value those Assets.
The Challenge
Inconsistent data capture and manual processing proved challenging for Surveyors in the field to provide As-Built that met the needs of Wellington Water’s data schemas.
- Wellington Water use CAD for their As-Built output and convert to GIS ESRI formats
- As-Built data is captured by external surveyors in the field using the 12D format
- Wellington Water can’t read 12D and the 12D application (application and format 12D xml) does not handle CAD or ESRI (Technically 12D can read CAD but due to its loose format it can’t enforce data integrity such as types out in the field – a significant limitation)
- For Surveyors in the field to provide an As-Built which would meet the Wellington Water requirements a Schema Template needs to be created. This template must take the form of an .XSD (an ADAC type format which is an industry standard)
The Results
To facilitate the goal of automatic data capture and entry meant developing a consistent Asset Data Schema that could be used for AutoCad drawings or 12d Model geospatial files. This work has resulted in the creation of a ‘Wellington Water 12DModel XSD file’ that both Wellington Water and 12D will roll out across the Wellington region in early 2020.
Working with FME, Wellington Water together with Kieran O’Donnell of Locus, the team of data evangelists developed a FME workspace which could generate the .XSD required; a template that could be loaded into the 12D application and provide 12D with all the required information on types etc. Surveyors were then able to select from drop-downs in the field ensuring 12D supplied data met the precise requirements of Wellington Water. The current .XSD consists of 3 waters-schema with the opportunity to scale-up as required.
The Future
Wellington Water continues to work with Locus and FME to refine the automatic data loading routines.
With plans to convert the 12D data supplied to an ESRI format and additionally once the As-Built has been pressed it may at times be necessary to send this data back as 12D; > a 12D to ESRI – > 12D. The latter will utilise the 12D Reader/Writer FME transformer scheduled for the upcoming FME release (2020).
