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Hi please bear in mind that I've got absolutely NO experience working with GIS before you begin laughing at this. During a recent meeting, our client was bouncing around their complaints about how detailed our annual reliability reports were and openly admitted to just reading the covering letter and the introduction before skipping 500-odd pages to the recommendation section.

They are looking for a means to visually represent the mechanical and electrical health of plant machinery which is not a major issue as we build a web portal with WPF dashboards, guages etc. which they seemed impressed with. However, because each building is multi-story they wanted a 'Google Maps' type interface control to navigate between building levels and ultimately zoom from floor --> room --> plant machine --> machine component. Again this is achievable through WPF controls but to get it to work we have to build each individual map from scratch.

After searching the net... I ended up here. Most of the application resources I have stumbled across discuss working with existing SHP files and I am searching for resource that focuses on creating SHP files from scratch. Thanks in advance for any help/advice as it will be greatly appreciated.

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This is more BIM/asset management than GIS and while obviously there is some overlap I don't think a shapefile is the silver bullet you're looking for. –  blah238 Oct 4 '12 at 6:08
For a better answer, consider adding details such as high level requirements, resources, budget, license (GPL, closed-source, etc) and any other important details. Are there other COTS applications that have some or all of this functionality? –  blah238 Oct 4 '12 at 6:20
Related: gis.stackexchange.com/questions/9803/… –  blah238 Oct 4 '12 at 6:29
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4 Answers

You might want to check out BiMserver. It's an open source building information model server.

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The Building Information Modelserver (short: BIMserver) projects creates software (the BIMserver software) that turns a computer/server into a ‘BIMserver’. A BIMserver enables you to centralize the information of a construction(or other building related)project. The core of the software is based on the open standard IFC and therefore knows how to handle IFC data. The BIMserver is nót a fileserver, but uses the Model-driven architecture approach. This means that IFC data are interpreted by a core-object and stored in an underlying database. The main advantage of this approach is the possibility to query, merge and filter the BIM-model and generate IFC files on the fly.

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Might be overkill for what you're looking for, but ESRI's CityEngine may be worth a look.


Esri CityEngine provides professional users in architecture, urban planning, entertainment, GIS, and general 3D content production with a unique conceptual design and modeling solution for the efficient creation of 3D cities and buildings.

If you haven't seen their Web Viewer yet, its pretty amazing.


CityEngine Web Viewer

Esri Campus Web Scene shows the Esri Campus in Redlands with a focus on the Development Headquarter. Detailed interior floorplans are visualized for buildings M, N and MA.

Some more web scenes:


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I don't know anything more about this than what it says on the page, but ARCHIBUS Geospatial Extensions for ESRI sounds like it might fit the bill.


Incorporate a geospatial perspective directly within your ARCHIBUS Web Central dashboards to unlock the power of geospatial visualization for improved analysis, reporting, and decision-making

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as you want to create 3d buildings there are some open source alternatives. like osggis. see osggis screentshots here. you may also give a look at VTP. these will help you to build 3d buildings and stuff. after preparing the data you can use some opensource 3d webgis tools for rendering on browser. as you said you are new to GIS its better to seek a help from a good gis developer because its not a basic task and will require some extra coding effort but finally it can be done using FOSS4G tools.

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