Tapio Ahomäki
Trimble Solutions Corporation
Tapio Ahomäki works as Consultation Manager for Trimble Solutions. He has long international experience in various software business positions, from product development to customer implementation, pre-sales and marketing. He has also worked as a cadastral surveyor for the cities of Espoo and Vaasa and National Land Survey of Finland. Tapio Ahomäki holds a Master of Science in Engineering from Helsinki University of Technology.
Traditionally city building process has been based on high accuracy 2D base maps. They have been used in all phases, from land use planning to infrastructure and building design and construction.
The latest technology allows rapid data collection in 3D. Laser scanning and imaging technologies are widely used in today’s land surveying. This enables the cities to extend their base maps into up-to-date 3D city models. When city models are enriched by attribute information about land parcels, buildings, infrastructure and even citizen and services, a complete Digital Twin of the city is created. All city model objects can be uniquely identified and the data is organized in semantic, machine readable structure. Data and models from different sources can be combined and used together, e.g. GIS, BIM, InfraBIM and Lidar data.
Semantic city model data needs to be shared with all stakeholders. Planners, designers and constructors need an easy access to the data. The data needs to be accurate and fit the purpose.
City modeling needs to be tied together with the normal daily routines, which is the only way to keep the data up-to-date without any extra efforts. New model objects, such as parcels and building, are created in surveying and building permitting processes, and will be automatically part of the Digital Twin following the progress of the process.
Trimble has been providing Finnish cities a model based software for storing and managing city data. The solution combines GIS and attribute information into a single data model. This has been the background for taking 3D city modeling into daily routine in the cities. The city model is part of normal data maintenance and always updated.
The latest trend on IT is to make services Cloud based, which gives a lot of benefits to the cities. There’s no need for local servers, no software to install, and the personnel can work from any location, any time. Trimble launched recently the 1st ever Cloud based software, where all GIS and attribute editing are made by using only browser. The application integrates the spatial data and key municipal work processes. The high quality spatial data can be maintained in both 2D and 3D views. The attribute information is combined into geospatial data as logical objects and the maintenance of all information is possible at the same time.
Finnish cities will be moving to have their Digital Twins in the Cloud. This enables all city stakeholders to have access to multi-usable and high-quality built environment information, from anywhere, anytime.
