Luc Van Linden
Managing Consultant
HL Consulting
Belgium

Biography
Luc Van Linden is an independent geospatial and telecommunications consultant with over 18 years’ experience in GIS and fiber optic networks. Luc is specialized in projects on geospatial and GIS data management. He focusses on the operational and decision-making purposes of GIS or location data. He supports a number of Utility and telecommunication companies in their asset-management and as-built, GI data-flows and processes. He implements automated solutions for “Call before you dig” systems using GI & mainstream IT components. He worked as an operations manager and project manager for a telecommunication company. Luc is an individual OGC member keen on bringing open standards implementations together.

Abstract
Challenges for Utility Companies in Flanders to Accommodate the New INSPIRE-based, Flemish Cable and Pipes Information Model, the Exchange As-Built Network Information

From the 1st of January 2016, a new policy will become active in Flanders facilitating and improving the exchange of utility network as-built information in order to reduce the number of damaged utility infrastructures during construction works on public domain. This “call before you dig" platform, hosted by the Flemish government will act as transactional gateway to deliver one single view on the existing underground networks for an area of interest that will be subject to future construction works. Via this platform all utility companies are obliged to supply their network information in a common single data Information Model for Cables and Pipes (IMKL). This information model is an extension of the INSPIRE Utility theme. Either through the Cable and Pipe Information Portal (KLIP) or via webservices, the utilities deliver their information packages according to the Open Geospatial consortium (OGC) encoding standard GML (Geographical Markup Language). For most of the utility companies this is a serious challenge to deal with, in addition to their day to day operation. Different aspects have to be dealt with in order to meet the 1st of January 2016 go life deadline. Older asset are still only documented in raster information or even analogue on paper. Secondly the network information must fit the Flemish large scale reference dataset. Third, some information elements must be enriched in order to map to the minimum required information elements within the model. Fourth, more technical, is the implementation of an INSPIRE/GML transformation mechanism to accommodate the requests. Using open source frameworks, we automated the required process to address the technical challenges, using the secured rest webservices to get the de area of interest details, transform and encode the network information into the response package in GML 3.2.1, publish the response to the KLIP portal and get a validation report. Although it requires a lot of effort from the Utilities and from the Flemish government, this approach realizes a series of benefits, savings and public safety improvements for all stakeholders.