Engineering excellence with Terria & Douglas Partners
This is a guest post by Russell Grew, Data Manager at Douglas Partners. The open source TerriaJS is designed for developing rich 2D, 3D data exploration and visualisation platforms. This post describes how the team at Douglas Partners developed their application using TerriaJS and its benefits.
Douglas Partners is an Australian engineering consultancy with a 50 year history specialising in geotechnical, environmental and groundwater engineering, rock mechanics, geophysics and earthworks. We offer advice to construction, infrastructure and environmental remediation projects of all sizes, ranging from single dwellings, to multi-story apartments and large office buildings, roads, deep basements, tunnels, train lines, and much more. Our workflows increasingly depend on digital and geospatial technology.
For many years DP have maintained geospatial explorer software for use in desktop studies, and to inform and complement field work. This comprises a customised desktop application, and instance of MapServer for publishing geospatial information via WMS. The desktop application offers a simpler user interface than specialist GIS packages thereby enabling colleagues who would otherwise be unable or unwilling to access this information. At the time of implementation few public facing government Web Map Services existed and so we sourced the necessary data from these departments, hosting it ourselves. In addition we host our own project database, spanning some 60k projects over our history. When a new client makes contact there is a good chance we have done work in the area before and this information is immediately available to our engineers.
While exploring National Map we noted that the underlying software, TerriaMap was open source and hosted on GitHub. We were initially sceptical given the polished corporate appearance of National Map. In practise it is remarkably easy to clone TerriaMap, do the npm install, run gulp and be up and running with a usable website, without any knowledge of web programming languages. Happily, the example custom colour scheme provided with TerriaMap included maroon as the dark primary colour and with a few additional changes a presentable “Douglas Map” was produced.
The catalogue makes it easy to add data, tapping into existing WMS installations, including our own. With the support of National Map, federated data sources are becoming commonplace, and we publish these on Douglas Map. These data sources would otherwise be isolated to our more digitally literate colleagues. We offer all employees the same high quality information to help them do their job. Many of our branches have their own landing page where data layers appropriate to their location and interests are preloaded along the panel on the left.
The Terria interface is more modern, and simpler to navigate than our incumbent software. This coupled with realistic terrain and 3D capabilities makes it an easy winner. One key advantage of aligning Douglas Partners with this technology is that TerriaJS and so TerriaMap is still in active development. While geotechnical engineering is not officially part of BIM we are taking strides in this direction and rely on suitably robust technology to support this.
The team at CSIRO Data61 wants others to use TerriaMap. They make themselves readily available on the TerriaJS Gitter to answer questions. This blog post is to encourage others to produce and talk about their own custom map. We look forward to further advances in federated data, Cesium and the Terria offering, ultimately allowing us to improve the quality of our service to our customers.
