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Geotechnical News • June 2014
27
GEOTECHNICAL INSTRUMENTATION NEWS
Advances in geotechnical data management and visualization
Robert Bachus
What were you doing on Sunday
morning, 12 January 2014? If you
are a die-hard, geotechnical data
“geek” you should have been at the
Transportation Research Board (TRB)
annual meeting in Washington, D.C
at 9:00 am with 75 of your colleagues
to participate in a workshop titled
“Advances in Geotechnical Data Man-
agement and Visualization.” I served
as the moderator for
the workshop.
TRB established the theme for the
2014 annual meeting as “Celebrating
Our Legacy, Anticipating Our Future”
and the workshop certainly reflected
that motto. The three-hour long ses-
sion included seven invited podium
presentations and a panel discussion
that featured six invited panelists, as
well as participation from the early-
risers in the audience. While the work-
shop participants certainly wanted to
celebrate the legacy of geotechnical
data management, the real focus of the
presentations was to alert all partici-
pants to the opportunities that we will
be afforded in the future should we
adopt these advances. A wide range
of discussion and presentation topics
were broadly categorized to capture
advances in:
• Software and data formats
• Data capture and interpretation
• Data management and visualiza-
tion.
Highlights and lessons from the work-
shop are summarized below.
Software and data format
updates
The workshop started with a reflection
and recognition of the series of articles
from the December 2010, March and
June 2011 issues of Geotechnical
Instrumentation News that highlighted
advances in web-based data manage-
ment software, given that this was the
most recent compilation of articles
on this topic.
[The initial article by
David Cook, titled “Fundamentals
of Instrumentation Database Man-
agement – Things to Consider” was
followed by eight one-page articles by
ten suppliers of the software. These
are, of course, accessible on www.
geotechnicalnews.com/instrumenta-
tion_news.php.
JD].
At the TRB workshop, recent addi-
tional updates and innovations to these
software packages were presented
by some of the presenters/develop-
ers, including Ed Kirby (itmsoil usa),
Andres Thorarinsson (Vista Engineer-
ing), and Allen Marr (Geocomp), who
provided updates to Argus, Vista Data
View, and iSiteCentral, respectively.
As a tribute to the benefits of technol-
ogy, Roger Chandler (Keynetix) was
unable to attend the workshop but
through the use of a video presentation
from his office in the U.K. was able to
provide software updates and reported
on the recent efforts in the U.K. to
require/incorporate geotechnical data
into Building Information Modeling
(BIM) software. A primary message
from these presenters was that mem-
bers of the software development com-
munity have their collective ears close
to the ground and are continuously
refining products and utilizing technol-
ogy that allows the geo-professional
to be more effective at doing their
job. A good example of this was the
relatively recent capability to store and
manage information “in the Cloud”,
as do many of the software packages
presented. It was interesting that many
of the presenters acknowledged the
benefits and recent efforts in the U.K.
and the U.S. to standardize the storage
and transfer of geotechnical data using
the Association of Geotechnical and
Geoenvironmental Specialists (AGS)
format that is used across the U.K. and
the Data Interchange for Geotechni-
cal and Geoenvironmental Specialists
(DIGGS) format being advocated in
the U.S. Rob Schweinfurth (Geo-Insti-
tute of ASCE) and Marc Hoit (North
Carolina State University) subse-
quently provided the participants with
an update of recent efforts to resurrect
the DIGGS development efforts and
indicated that the Geo-Institute of the
American Society of Civil Engineers
(ASCE) has recently taken respon-
sibility for final development and
public release of the DIGGS format by
October 2015.
Data capture and interpretation
A number of the presentations were
focused on the interest in and pro-
pensity to require collection of large
amounts of data and the accompany-
ing need and importance of accurately
interpreting these data. Shaun Dustin
(Campbell Scientific) summarized the
efforts and commitment of vendors/
developers to provide reliable data
collection hardware, but cautioned
that as an equipment provider, their
job is not to maintain the project
databases. Gary Young (Underground
Imaging Technologies) discussed how
equipment manufacturer partners are
utilizing instrumentation on equipment
to monitor engineering performance,
but emphasized the need to be able to
quickly and reliably interpret results.
He specifically acknowledged collabo-
ration/interaction with Caterpillar and
its project teams working with Cater-
pillar’s Katherine Braddy. Two exam-
ples were provided to demonstrate
the benefit (and thus the necessity) to
accurately interpret the collected data.
Ken Fishman (McMahon and Mann)
presented a case history regarding cor-
rosion in steel strips and performance
monitoring of mechanically stabilized
earth (MSE) structures. Hai-Tien Yu