Data Aggregation with InfraWorks and ArcGIS for Visualization, Analysis, and Planning

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: So who here saw yesterday the announcement about Esri and Autodesk working together? Who here was jazzed about that? So many of you may know-- I'll give you the class summary. And essentially, there were some things they had to change here. Because what you're going to be seeing is, in some ways, a very general approach to building a kind of aggregator as a web page using ArcGIS Online itself. And that'll give you an idea of the power, because it's a pretty good looking little tool. But it's only using ArcGIS online and Dojo and other JavaScript standard tools. So it's something anybody really could build.

So anyway, so this tool, though, is very close to-- some of you might recognize some of it-- the tool that is being built with Autodesk right now for InfraWorks. So what I have to do is set expectations, OK. So this is a tool. We've got a white paper that Sean has prepared that gives you a bit of an outline on how you could build such a thing. And we want to make sure that you understand what's involved in deploying ArcGIS Online, how to go about that, how to use it as an aggregation platform for sharing data widely.

And if you're an engineering organization, you want to share it with third parties. In a municipality like Dan Campbell from Vancouver, you want to share it with contractors and the public. It's kind of an unparalleled tool for being able to do that from an ease of use point-of-view, just from a configurability point-of-view, setting up groups, security, access, all those things which we'll go over.

But there is movement in that direction from a product point of view. But I can't really say any more about that. And I just want to say this is a prototype, essentially, of what could be done. I don't want to give any kind of impression that this is a product that is going to be coming out in any kind of future release. It's sort of like the standard non-disclosure thing. But we are working with Autodesk on products of this kind. So just so you know. So if you have further questions, feel free to ask.

OK, so what I'm hoping you'll come away with here is knowledge about how to use ArcGIS Online to put data together. And I have to apologize. One of our technical specialists, Jonathan Bailey who did a lot of the work on this, was not available to come to this conference. So if you have questions on the specifics of the ArcGIS Online thing that either Sean or I cannot answer, we'll make sure that we get back to him. And you'll get an answer in a week or so when he becomes available again. We want to give you an idea of how you can use the web services and that ArcGIS Online platform to build applications that do the aggregation of the data and give you an idea of the workflow for doing so with a North American city with a few video demos along the way to sort of show how it all works.

That's me. I guess this is a new thing in the Autodesk University sort of standard. So actually I sort of started my whole career-- I was a math person at Stats Canada, the Canadian statistics agency. And I was figuring I was going to be doing labor force survey statistics and everything like that. But my first job was actually in their GIS department doing automated districting for the 1991 census. And that was in the '80s. And we used ArcInfo 3. And we built this incredible system to do automated districting for the entire country. It's all done by hand manually with paper maps and everything like that. And unbelievable project-- probably still one of the most intellectually demanding I've ever done.

And I never came back. I never looked back. I've done GIS forever since then. I worked for Autodesk for about 10 years and started my own company about nine or 10 years ago to just do consulting in a kind of impartial basis-- help customers adopt this kind of technology widely in their organizations, solve data problems, solve process problems, and that kind of thing. So that's me.

OK, so the use cases. One of the most critical parts of Infraworks, of course, is on the pre-planning side. And ArcGIS Online is-- and ArcGIS in general, ArcGIS Server-- is this repository for the data that you could use to do that. And to be honest, unless you're using Shapefiles, you've got to go through some hoops to get the data out of ArcGIS and into InfraWorks today.

But that's really a critical part of the workflow, right. Because let's say you're putting buildings in. You're putting some civil 3D models in. You're getting other models. Your job is hard enough aggregating all this data from all these different data sources with Infraworks. The ArcGIS side of it is actually much more difficult than we feel it should be.

So the data aggregation, though, from a sort of portal kind of site would allow sort of version control, security publishing kind of to the correct people who are allowed to use it, and so on. And data control, that's a really huge, important part of this. We've worked with Vault before trying to do this kind of. But there's no interface between Infraworks and Vault, for example.

So data vintage-- that, from a proposal and submittal and design point-of-view and a planning point of view, it's a crucial, crucial, crucial issue. And when data is out of sync or not correct, often you have to redo your whole plan. And that's a very time-consuming process.

From a stakeholder coordinations, very much the same thing. The richness and quality of the data sets-- and this is also true. Right now, there's a model builder in InfraWorks which allows you to use OpenStreetMap data, which often has limits. So with ArcGIS Online, you have access to probably one of the most extensive-- if not the most extensive-- sets of data that's available. Both publicly available data sets and data sets you can share within your organization and private data sets that you can have, that you can put up there.

So if you are an ArcGIS online user, you can even put up other work onto that site. And you'll see there's a sort of accordion style user interface for browsing it and loading it. So how many of you have used ArcGIS and InfraWorks as of this moment? By hook or by crook-- like, by having to do something to do it, but--

It's not a huge number. How many of you would want to? OK, all right. So we're getting there slowly but surely. How have you done it? Paul, so you've done it. How?

AUDIENCE: Right here-- Shapefile export.

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Shapefile export, yep-- Shapefile export. Anyone tried to use direct connections like to an ArcSDE database or anything like that? Did you--

AUDIENCE: Not through SDE, but [INAUDIBLE].

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: OK, right, sort of bypassing-- yeah, great, exactly, right, right. That works, actually. But still, it's internal. It's not organized necessarily. And OK, great. So those are good examples. And that one is a really good one because the providers-- you need the client software libraries on it. And yeah, so we'll get to that. It's kind of a problem.

So right now, if you're just using the data sources panel-- and what we're doing here, you'll still have to do that. But anyway, if you're using the data sources panel, you have a very limited number of choices. You can get to our ArcGIS data that's in SDE. You're kind of bypassing things, going straight to the database. Shapefiles is absolutely the most common way to do it. You have to get in and out of those Shapefiles.

Raster ArcGIS data sources, though, well-- how do we get to those, right? It's not evident how you would get to that. You can't necessarily connect. I mean, you could if you published a WFS or a WMS, I guess. But you get the picture. It's not necessarily the best way of doing it. And that licensing aspect is very confusing, because you have to have an ArcGIS license and all the libraries configured on that on your InfraWorks box.

So ArcGIS Online is now an option, or is going to be very soon. And you need to prepare the data for doing that. So what is ArcGIS online? I'm going to say some platitudes here. I'm not going to go into every detail of it. It's really, I mean, in some ways-- how many people here have seen Autodesk Forge or have a kind of basic understanding of what that is? OK, not too many. That's interesting, actually. I do encourage you to explore it and kind of learn from it.

There are certain things that you cannot do now. There's already a lot of things you can do. But in the future, it's going to be amazing what you can do-- especially design automation, API, automating workflows, and that kind of thing. It's going to be quite a wild ride. ArcGIS Online is, in many ways, Esri's equivalent. But it's vast-- the number of services you have, the way it's organized. And the way it complements the ArcGIS for server, the whole portal concept, and the way they work together in very compatible ways is just absolutely brilliant, to be honest with you.

It's a platform for sharing and discovering geographic data. And APIs, use when you see them-- because everything we've done here has been built with ArcGIS Online, right. So this is something that anyone essentially could build. It has ready-to-use data and maps. It has analytical tools. So this is really important. You're not just publishing data. You can publish services. And those services don't have to just be data services. They can be functional services on the data as well-- and tools, of course. And it's a platform for application development, as you'll see here.

The API for it is really extensive. And I mean, at the end of the day, you have everything available to you that you have available in JavaScript, right. So pretty much what it looks like is completely up to you. But the services that you can use-- the REST APIs and the JavaScript Dojo libraries and so on that Esri provides-- allow you to have really deep, rich content that looks, I think, really, really good.

The other nice thing is, the geospatial layers can be integrated-- your own and sort of public ones and imagery layers. And so essentially you can now, I think quite easily, build a pretty good-looking map from these online data sources. And you're no longer going out, building a directory on your local drive or on some network share, and slapping these things together. The core geospatial information can be aggregated from that single site. Did you have a question?

AUDIENCE: One of the cool things lately is, there's no [INAUDIBLE] of Esri involved. Especially, I'm from Arizona, where they are very strict about data sharing. We are one of those states that they outlawed data sharing in the cities and counties. But because Esri has encouraged this new open sharing platform, a lot of communities that usually are difficult to get data from are now pushing their data out on there that a lot of people had no idea it exists.

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Right, right-- no, that's true. And they make it very, very easy. I've got some video demos here of how to do that. And this will eventually be up on the Autodesk University website. We had some trouble publishing it to there today. But the content here includes some video demos of how to do things with ArcGIS Online. So we'll get to some of that. But that whole sharing of data is at the heart of it. It's true. And I think it's of enormous value. And even from a business workflow point of view, it makes it so easy. It's no longer something you have to do yourself. You use the portal to do that, or ArcGIS Online.

So Portal for ArcGIS is essentially a deployment of ArcGIS Online in your own infrastructure. So that's also possible to do. And this application could essentially be driven off of local infrastructure rather than public infrastructure. Which, I mean, Esri has done a great job on the security models and the certifications, which I'm forgetting. But there's a number of different European certifications and North American certifications for the use of online services.

And that's actually one of the toughest parts of the job we're doing on this right now, is to make sure that security and privacy are absolutely strictly adhered to. In fact, one of the biggest risks of cloud development today for anybody who's embarking on it is that. You cannot leave junk around, right. You've got to be extremely cautious about that.

So the discovery of data is really important. And you can search across your own organization. Anything that you have access to that is being made available to you for access can be used. So give you some idea of the services that are available there. There's a table of that in a minute. So we'll just move on. But I'll just give you a brief video demo here. I'm hoping this works. I haven't tried it in this kind of context. Oh, you know what? Now, can I move this? Yeah-- oh dear.

Yes, so this is just an example video demo of putting up some content to your ArcGIS Online site. And one of the important things here-- and this was something we had a lot of debate about. But you can link your own infrastructure services up to ArcGIS Online, and then you can control access. So this gives you the ability to say-- that's the site we put together, just an online site on Azure to do this demo, essentially. But you can give it a title. And then later, you can publish it to certain specific people and make it available according to the restrictions you want.

So in essence, the ArcGIS Online platform Is kind of isolating you from-- it's almost like a virtual private GIS network, in a sense. Right, because they're not-- customers or your stakeholders are not directly accessing your web services. They're mediated by the ArcGIS Online platform. So they don't know your URL. They don't know anything about that part of it. They're just using it as a service from the ArcGIS Online platform. OK. Now, how do we get in this? OK. Excuse me.

Open data standards-- GeoJSON, OGC standards, all of them pretty much, KML. We use a lot of the GeoJSON these days, because it's just the ideal sort of tool to be using for data exchange for GIS on the web platform with REST APIs, which are the core kind of API technology that's being used to build these applications. And then-- as you can see here-- you have this ability to share specifically to everyone, make it a public data set, your own specific organization, or specific groups that you've defined that have multiple users and so on in them. So that ability to say who gets to see what-- and managed from a single platform-- is really important.

Those setups-- I'll show another video for that. They lead to a sort of really nice way of organizing the data into private organizational group and public data sets. So let's do this again. OK, I can't see my mouse. Where is the mouse? There it is, OK. All right-- yeah, so here you'll see we've got those orthophotos from Vancouver that we've just published. All right, so let's say-- who do we want to make them available to? And of course, that's coming from our own private server, right. But it's, again, mediated.

All right, it's not shared yet. Let's share it. Let's share it with just Brockwell. OK, and so then it becomes an organizational data set. And that's how it's organized when you go through this accordion viewer to see what's happening. If I share it with Autodesk University, which is a larger group, then it's shared with that group-- just different ways of doing it. So that ability to easily share data is really critical to the whole process.

So particular, kind of just the way you would do this-- so user A in one department creates a GIS data set and shares it using ArcGIS Online. Someone in the same organization, maybe in a different location-- maybe they're in Boston or Seattle where some of the design stuff is taking place-- they search for the data sets. And think about that, right. All of the network stuff-- internally, it's just so much easier to do this over the cloud than it is to do these things internally. I've seen it. We've all seen it. Network share-- oh, the network share is down. Oh, the credentials have changed. It's just a total nightmare to have to manage things that way.

And the fact is, I was talking to someone from an engineering firm last night who lives and works just near Redmond, I guess, so Washington. And he's working on a project in British Columbia, actually. So there's people in Vancouver that are doing work. And it's just-- managing those shares is so much easier to do through a portal concept like this. So this user B who's in another location gets the data sets, aggregates them, and incorporates them into their model-- and then can refresh them, can go back and get new ones, and so on.

So without ArcGIS Online in this context-- and I want to say this too. When you see this tool, there's absolutely nothing to stop you from using the same approach to put data into Civil 3D or AutoCAD Map or something like that. So this is not limited only to InfraWorks. But without this kind of approach, you don't have a really easy way to federate your geographic data. Right now, it exists all over the place. And this is a great way to do that organization and then make it available to the people who have an interest.

This is searchable and discoverable. We'll show you that in the demo. So you can actually type in keywords, addresses, and that kind of thing, go to location and find the data sets that are in that area. That's what I mean about the beauty. When you think about that, that's the beauty of the REST APIs that are underneath, right. So when we say-- OK, type in Vancouver-- it finds Vancouver. We go to Vancouver on the map. It only shows Vancouver data sets by area, because it's searching through the catalog to find those things which match those extents.

It's not showing you public data sets in Ohio, because they're not relevant to that spatial context. And that's all part of the API set that's there. So that search and discovery part is really important. And then the versioning aspect too-- you've only got published versions that are comfortable, are appropriate to use in that context. So it's a single repository for your geographic data that gives you secure access to different organizations. It's hosted on the ArcGIS Online infrastructure. A similar concept would work on Portal.

You can define canonical data sets that are valid for use in engineering or other operations. And that API gives you an incredibly rich ability to do searching and all that kind of stuff, which we'll show in a minute. So there are some links here to just different definitions. Those are all hyperlinks. Feature layers, imagery, sources, hosted layers, and the web services themselves-- so there's tons of information. That's the one sort of overwhelming thing. There's a lot to do.

But this is coming, right. I'm not going to define or tell you exactly what the final form of this will look like. But this is part of what this collaboration between Esri and Autodesk is all about-- putting this in your hands as part of a product at a point in time in the future. So I just want to make sure that's clear to you. So I wouldn't suggest, like, all of you start to put into your budgets for development plans to build an equivalent tool for this when it's coming in a fairly short period of time.

OK, so to prepare your ArcGIS data for use in InfraWorks, you create the data sets in ArcGIS. You publish them, and then you share them. And it's that simple, really. So if I'm on ArcGIS Pro, for example, I publish it. There's some instructions on how to do that. We've given you links for how to do that. That's really relevant information, because that's something you will be doing. And then you can publish from ArcMap, of course, as well. And that's really easy to do. It's a simple sort of form wizard that allows you to do that. Just push them up there, and you're done.

So how many are using ArcGIS, rather than just ArcMap-- but ArcGIS the full suite like ArcGIS Server-- today? OK, vast majority of people. And how many of you have adopted ArcGIS Online in some form? OK, that's a good number. That's good because different organizations have different fears about security and that kind of thing. I think it's the way to go. I think we can have a whole separate discussion about security. But that's good. So who among you that is using ArcGIS but is not using ArcGIS Online, what are your concerns? Would you mind sharing what your concerns are, if anyone would want to do that? Nobody? Nobody has a concern? Yeah?

AUDIENCE: My question is-- firewall settings [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Right, yeah. OK, we can talk about that later. Because if you use ArcGIS Online and you're comfortable with that, it's not inside your firewall. If, however, you want to use it internally through Portal, you can build your own internal portal that is not accessed outside. And you can have your own firewall so that the same approach would work internally. And then, you don't have the ability to have the same level of sharing, of course. Because you can't get public data sets, unless you integrate those with your portal, which you could do.

So I think there are options for both. And that's really important. And one of the things-- there are some ArcGIS folks here in the room-- that they've done a great job of is the compatibility of the APIs across Portal and ArcGIS Online. Just makes it so easy because it's really almost identical. The URLs are different, but the services are the same, essentially. OK, that's a great question. Thank you.

All right, so how do we go about integrating and doing this? Let's just sort of try to get into it. So I'm just going to sort of jump to it. I'm going to do a video demo too in a few minutes. But essentially, you just log in. That's our page for logging in to the ArcGIS Online site. Then we have this little sort of portal viewer, which has a number of different components. And this is just built with ArcGIS Online web services and a bunch of JavaScript-- and some clever software engineering by Jonathan, pretty much, more than anyone on this side.

I can type in Vancouver at the top there, and it will zoom me into that area. And it'll match whatever is available in the kind of keywords that I have available to match. I'm going to find an area of interest. And some of you will see this looks very familiar. So that's what I'm saying about the InfraWorks side. This is not too far away. Then, you can type in and search data sets by name, and so on, and find the data that you need. The tools-- and this is, again, all built with the ArcGIS APIs online, tools for defining the boundary. It doesn't have to be just a fixed polygon or a square. It can be an actual kind of specific kind of polygon you want to do.

It still has some of the same limits InfraWorks has in terms of size of the model. Search terms for data sets-- and this is this nice accordion sort of style viewer. That is what we put together that has user organized and shared and public data sets. And so I'm going through and I'm picking the ones I want. I build up a whole model, essentially, by clicking these data sets. And then I give my model kind of a name. And I download either GeoJSON or Shapefiles for that. And the raster also downloads if pick raster data sets and downloads as TIFF or whatever it happens to be.

And that's all wrapped up in a package. And that's actually really cool too, because those sets are constrained spatially as well, right. So that's all the rest APIs on the ArcGIS Online services side. So I'm saying-- OK, I want all these services, but I want them for this area. So the little tool, when you click that button, that's what it's doing. It's iterating over all your data sets, clipping them out, and downloading them onto your client.

So then from there, then-- right now, you are doing the same style of data loading in InfraWorks that you would do typically. The big thing is, you're doing it from an organized set of data sources that you've been able to find online or in a portal that you've put together with this. So makes it much, much easier. They are all in the same location, downloaded conveniently using the actual names. And the thing is too, these are the actual data sets, right. No data has been filtered out. It's whatever the published data has as attributes are there.

So for example, when you're configuring your data sources, you can give a name. You can give buildings a height-- a fixed height-- or you can set the height based on them, which we have. All of these standard properties can then be mapped to the ArcGIS data. So if you want to do traffic simulations, if you want to do water type simulations, you've got that ability to have that pipe network map to your ArcGIS data attributes-- which is the whole point of having that data together.

So what we're working on too is even being able to set the style at the point in time of download. So this is a direction, right. This is something that is a preview of what is going to come. And then, you get something that looks like that. This is just a model. I mean, this took minutes to do. Sean could show you. This is city of Vancouver with different building data based on the height of their buildings. And this is all available on ArcGIS Online today from the city of Vancouver. So you can get started pretty quickly. The terrain model is from their site. And piping is there. And all these pipes are actually built-- their diameter is actually the actual diameter. And their elevation is based on the actual data that's in the database.

So really very kind of clean way of doing it. I'll just show you a brief video demo of it. And hang on here for a second. Where is the-- sorry. I think it's doing it. It's just slow. Yeah, it's doing it. Yes, this gives you a little bit of a more dynamic sense of how the whole thing works. And as I said, Sean has produced a white paper that gives you some of the ideas of how this was built. But you can see the type I have there, zooming to the location, zooming in.

All of this was built with ArcGIS Online APIs, which is kind of cool, right. A product is kind of interesting and strong if you can use it to demonstrate it very effectively. That's sort of a pretty cool thing. Yes, so here you're selecting. And it just remembers which data sets you have. So you pick a bunch of data sets. And give it a name. And off you go. Just download that, and you're pretty much ready.

All right-- and then, just show a brief video of using it in InfraWorks, using the data. Now, what's going to happen-- I'll just say it. The model creator-- who has used ModelBuilder before with the OpenStreetMap data? OK, great, a good number of people. All right, so this is going to be a part of ModelBuilder. So your whole model will end up being created using this mechanism. And you'll get the whole model pre-baked for you. Exactly when, I can't say-- but that's what we're doing.

AUDIENCE: Can you talk about the data integration [INAUDIBLE]?

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Pardon me?

AUDIENCE: The discussion came up about large model files. [? Does that include this ?] data aggregation?

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Yeah. When you say large model files, do you mean Large Model Viewer? Well, so that's an InfraWorks-specific question, really. And already, now, you can have a Large Model Viewer version of the online model. But that's a moving work in progress. Because they were doing it by one means a couple of releases ago. And now they're starting to use the actual Large Model Viewer to do it. So that's essentially all I can really say about that. It's a work in progress. But it does work more or less now. And you also mean about making the models bigger?

AUDIENCE: Taking this, I think this integration side of [INAUDIBLE] Large Model Viewer. And we've got this data aggregation side in ArcGIS Online working together. So obviously, we don't want to be too, say-- I want this from here. I want this from there. Is there some integration going on with that?

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: I think that's a really good question. So the question is-- because we're recording this. Are there plans to have a sort of single way to-- I may be paraphrasing. And if I got it wrong, just let me know. But are there are other ways to sort of handle the larger aspect of data integration and data prep-- data staging, I guess, in a sense-- for these models? Because you have your Revit models. You have building models-- you might. You've got lidar files, right. The whole model contains much more than ArcGIS. The ArcGIS data-- I didn't want to imply that, I hope I didn't-- is a starting point for the geospatial data that you need in your model to do the full design.

But you're going to get Civil 3D files, architecture. There's a lot of other data you're going to get too. Where does that go? That question has not been fully answered yet. But it's a huge topic in the team. Because ideally, you want transparency, right. You want data transparency for the whole thing. And you want things to refresh automatically as well. So that's an excellent question. That's all I can say about it at this point though.

So you can see we're just beavering away here, taking the data that we downloaded from the site and putting it together into an InfraWorks model using the ArcGIS attributes from whatever service you've published and--

AUDIENCE: Have you done anything similar using services so you can have a dynamic link to the data as well?

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Yeah, we're talking about that. So the question is-- is there anything being done to do the data, do it dynamically? So one nice thing if you're using stuff from the client-- and so, in a sense, if you were to refresh your data and then refresh your layers, that would work, right?

AUDIENCE: Right, but it's [INAUDIBLE], right?

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so just the way InfraWorks works, because of partly the way it's distributed too, because it's sort of an interesting hybrid. And of necessity, to render everything is one thing. Doing the design side, it's on a sort of desktop, right. But the data is in the cloud, or nominally in the cloud. There's some services that are used in the cloud. So that's not all fully organized yet, in my opinion. But that's absolutely a known issue. And we're looking at making it so. Because you don't want to just regenerate your model. Again, because as Paul pointed out, then you've got other data sets that-- well, whoops, I've lost it.

So it's a very excellent point. And I would urge you to make that clear to Dave Simeone, Don [? Filbrick, ?] and the product managers on their side that we know it, right. It's a constant topic of conversation. It's just, given the architecture and the platform, how do you solve that in the right way? That's really the biggest challenge.

OK, and then that's it really, essentially. I mean-- excuse me. I sort have a cold. As I said, we have a white paper that explains, in principle, the APIs and things that we've used. There are the links to the little videos through there. There's a lot of links to the ArcGIS Online documentation that shows you how to do this. And we finished a little bit early. But we have it open-- totally open-- for other questions. If you have any, I would be happy to answer them.

AUDIENCE: I think this is a great tool for site analysis and also [INAUDIBLE] Does E4 automatically recognize the [INAUDIBLE]?

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: That's a good question. And someone else might know the answer to that. The question is-- on the Civil 3D side, if I have a Civil 3D surface like a 10 model, can I use that as the surface for InfraWorks? And I'm not actually sure you can. You can, OK. I wasn't sure because I didn't--

AUDIENCE: You just have to identify that as the surface.

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Right, OK.

AUDIENCE: And so you can actually cut holes in your model to bring in-- we do that all the time. I want to do a nice, accurate site. And you want to see [INAUDIBLE] around it for visualization. So you can cut a hole and put your site in there and [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: Right-- that's why you cut a hole in the ArcGIS [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: Yeah, and they have a way to do it. They have an area. And you can do it in area. There's essentially a hole. So you take your--

AUDIENCE: You basically crop it.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: OK-- perfect, excellent. Thank you. Yes, [? Dan? ?]

AUDIENCE: Yeah, is there any consideration being given to reverse flow? Say Apache created some new data. [INAUDIBLE] in ArcGIS?

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: That's part of the bigger discussion about data kind of transparency and simplicity. So it's an objective. I think it's a longer-term one. But it's definitely on the radar. And again, things like that make clear what the workflow is and why it's important. Yes?

AUDIENCE: The way around that right now is Civil 3D, right. Because everything that you can design and draw in InfraWorks is really going to be a Civil 3D object. Like your lines-- and so that stuff, you still create it and put it into Shapefiles.

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Right. I mean, has the Shapefile export from Civil 3D evolved at all?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, and then you use an SDF, [INAUDIBLE] SDF.

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: OK, so because there's a Shapefile one that isn't really that good. So go SDF and then Shapefile.

AUDIENCE: SDF format work the best.

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: OK, all right-- good. Thanks. Yes?

AUDIENCE: I'm wondering if you've had any experience in combining this kind of information with dialogue data.

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: No. So the question was-- have we had any experience integrating dialogue data with this? So can you explain what that is? I'm sorry. I just--

AUDIENCE: Having interaction with the people living there--

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Oh, I see. I see, OK.

AUDIENCE: --what they need and how they are losing spaces today and what they actually see in their environment. [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: OK, yeah. At the ArcGIS user conference there was quite a lot of discussion about-- that particular name did not come up in my ears, but about that process. And I think there are tools to be able to do those kinds of things.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Absolutely. That's a really--

AUDIENCE: --understand some of the [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Absolutely-- yeah, yeah. I think that is an--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] any solutions?

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: No-- no specific solutions around that, no. But it's a good one. Presumably it-- and dialogue is a product?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: So we'll look into that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Well, but is it supported by a product? Or you could build a dialogue process with any kind of workflow management kind of product?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] different stakeholders and you have to talk with them.

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Right-- OK, OK. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] One of the cool things about InfraWorks is [INAUDIBLE] public meeting is dangerous, because it's not necessarily always the most stable. But you can have a public meeting and discussion. And we do browse the sites right there because it's so fast to do that, and then build your proposal to a site and then sort of raise it up. I've done that for [INAUDIBLE] major roadways. People talk about-- well, we don't want to go through our neighborhood. [INAUDIBLE] somewhere else. If you built your model with enough area around it, you could have a public meeting, have a discussion, show options right there, and get input that way.

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: I think part of your idea though would be that, in a way, once it's online you would be able to do that through a portal kind of, almost a social media aspect. That was one of the main stage top talks at the Esri user conference in the summer. Because that would be very cool, right. So just literally--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Yeah, yeah-- and that actually is getting there with InfraWorks, with scenarios and these kinds of things. So I think it's an excellent question. And Jessica, if you don't mind making sure that that is-- you've already done it.

AUDIENCE: No, but I was just about to.

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: OK. Yes? Hi, I'm not as familiar with ArcGIS and InfraWorks. [INAUDIBLE] I'm not sure if you can answer [INAUDIBLE].

AUDIENCE: Is there a way to bring in I guess, the geometry and the data as layers and parameters into InfraWorks or ArcGIS?

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: I don't know whether you can do it in that specific way. But you can definitely bring in Revit models, yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Yeah, that's right.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] a lot of data.

AUDIENCE: So if you were to try to incorporate a bridge into InfraWorks, and we have [INAUDIBLE] on the bridge. Can I bring that up as a separate kind of layer in InfraWorks? [INAUDIBLE] in the same way?

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Dave, you may by answering that. But I didn't think you necessarily-- not separated.

AUDIENCE: You could do it as a whole model. But you could also export the separate pieces. And you can do it that way as well.

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Right, but you'd export it from a Revit point-of-view first, yeah.

AUDIENCE: You'd take the Revit-- basically, you'd take that model and bring it in. But if you broke it up into more of the models and brought each one in, it would work the same way. The trick is going to be getting aligning.

AUDIENCE: Oh-- is there no way to [INAUDIBLE]?

AUDIENCE: Well, you can. It's just [INAUDIBLE].

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: That's another thing we're working on, actually, to make sure that the-- this is something Sean has been sort of starting to work on, making that actually correct so your Revit model is actually oriented and has data supporting it that it can be put into geographic space easily. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right-- yeah. Other questions? Yes, sir?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: I don't think it would mean that, no. It's more of a technology thing. But I would not be the appropriate person to-- I'm not an Autodesk employee. So there's a few people that you could talk to about that. But it would be inappropriate for me to answer that question, I'm afraid. So I'm sorry, but that would be one that I--

The question was just-- what will the partnership actually offer? And will you get kind of co-software working both ways? I don't think that's the case. So you'd have your ArcGIS Online. Or in your ArcGIS you'd have your Autodesk licensing. And what you'd have is interoperability between the two. You would not get an ArcGIS license with your Autodesk product, for sure. I'm very confident about that. But it's a question best asked of Autodesk.

AUDIENCE: Is there anybody who could answer it here?

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: There is. Karen Hodge-- ArcGIS for AutoCAD product manager and just a fantastic product.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: There's a lot of different models of licensing in ArcGIS Online. [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHEN BROCKWELL: Anything else? Yes? No-- OK. All right, wonderful. Thank you very much-- appreciate it.