MoreIndustry software vendors as well as government and private consultants involved in the surveying and civil engineering industry are jointly developing LandXML standards to allow the exchange of data between different software packages. This eliminates the problems faced by many organizations in the past of trying to read and review project data that is in a proprietary format.
In a related partnership, CAiCE is also relying on LandXML to integrate with FHWA’s IHSDM Safety Software.
LandXML is an industry standard schema that facilitates the exchange of data created during the surveying and civil engineering design process by making the data more readily accessible and to anyone working on a project. It provides interoperability between different applications software as well as between varying versions of software. With LandXML, project data is independent of the authoring software, thus overcoming the interoperability problems that transportation groups using different systems have experienced in the past. LandXML is also web compatible and will eventually allow engineering groups to share data over the Internet.
Organizations using Visual PE with LandXML will see an immediate impact on their workflow processes through:
- Increased productivity by allowing users seamless transfer of survey, design and construction data between various civil applications, versions and different hardware systems. Datasets will no longer need to be translated and checked for data integrity
- Standardization of deliverables where one file is now required rather than several files containing the same information
- The simple creation of additional tags that pass along data, through standard revisions and updates
- Easy access to archived data for future projects
- The uses of web-based tools to view, edit, and report LandXML data. Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) style sheets can be easily created and applied to LandXML data and then run from a project web page. Examples include XSL style sheets that format raw point data into point tables, or format data to match an organization's internal standards, such as legal descriptions for parcel reports.
The LandXML component will be part of the Visual PE’s interface and will be available as part of the Visual PE 9.1 version, to be released on September 15. Test files have been place on www.landxml.org. In addition, CAiCE users who have active maintenance accounts can visit CAiCE’s service site ( http://service.caice.com ) for more detailed information.
