Dotted Eyes’ Seminar - GIS and CAD Key Business Benefits

It was designed to show how CAD/GIS integration can deliver greater value through an emerging model called the Unified Spatial Environment (USE). Among those to benefit from USE will be designers, engineers, asset and estate managers, architects and many other decision makers across the public and private sectors. Tracey Stone, Autodesk’s Geospatial Sales Manager for Northern Europe, who presented at the seminar, said: “This was the first opportunity to showcase our partnership with Dotted Eyes and the benefits that our solutions bring to the USE.

Anyone who uses spatial data with a design element has the same challenge: how to maximise their investment in this data by ensuring all those who need it have fast and easy secure access to a single, centralised source. By eliminating CAD and GIS silos, the USE model does exactly this.” In his presentation, Benjamin Allan, Dotted Eyes Managing Director, said USE offers a seamless way to reduce overheads at a time when spatial data managers face a twin headache of growing complexity and greater customer demand. He said: “Unifying the traditionally separate technologies of CAD and GIS will facilitate better cross-functional management of spatial data. The priorities and timetable for developing USE will be driven by customer demand. The real power will be as an enabler for greater data sharing within and beyond organisations so saving them time and money and enhancing the quality of their work.” Mr Allan said the partnership with Autodesk was crucial to the development of USE as it will help bring much needed solutions which enable the integration of CAD and GIS to the market.

The seminar looked at a series of examples of where CAD and GIS integration is already feasible. David Eagle, Professional Services Manager at Dotted Eyes, showed how translation tools can link design software with data storage files, databases, open source tools and web services. Neil Brooker, Autodesk Geospatial Technical Manager for Northern Europe, explained the aspects of current design visualisation tools which enable GIS professionals to style spatial data and carry out geographic analysis. One of the key products available from Dotted Eyes under its partnership with Autodesk is AutoCAD Map 3D. The agreement adds a further world-leading name to Dotted Eyes’ partner list of GIS and data vendors. The company is already the biggest Pitney Bowes MapInfo partner in the UK and a premier partner of Ordnance Survey.