Autodesk today announced it is working with the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) and the Incheon Urban Development Corporation (IUDC) to cooperate in the creation of Asia’s first Digital City for Incheon, Korea — the ‘Tomorrow City’ in Song-do City. Autodesk has designated Incheon as the second pilot city of its Digital City initiative, after announcing Salzburg, Austria in July. Read More…

Furthering its commitment to providing the geospatial open source community with faster innovation and support for standards worldwide, Autodesk announced the availability of new providers developed on Feature Data Object (FDO) open data access technology. FDO technology, originally created by Autodesk and now a fully endorsed project in the open source community through the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), allows users to store, retrieve, update, and analyze geospatial data.

The new providers include two new Autodesk FDO Providers: Autodesk FDO Provider for GE Smallworld and Autodesk FDO Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2008, which are now available through the Autodesk subscription program for AutoCAD Map 3D and Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise. The FDO Provider for Microsoft SQL Server 2008 will also become available on OSGeo through the FDO open source project.

In addition, new FDO Providers for IBM Informix, KML, and PostGIS have been developed by the open source community. The latest FDO Providers allow customers to take advantage of the native support for additional spatial data formats—and let users more easily access, view, edit and analyze data—within Autodesk geospatial software.

The announcement was made today at the annual Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference in Cape Town, South Africa, where geospatial open source developers and users join to learn, present and network. “As a development partner, we appreciate the impact that open source technology has had for increased community collaboration and rapid innovation,” said Haris Kurtagic, CEO, SL-King. “By providing the open source community the ability to work seamlessly on a variety of spatial and non-spatial databases and file formats natively, without the need for translation or risk of data loss, we further the success of the geospatial community as a whole.”

“Today’s announcement underscores our commitment to our geospatial customers and the open source community,” said Lisa Campbell, vice president, Autodesk Geospatial. “Autodesk continues to partner and work closely with the community to help these technologies gain adoption—and evolve and improve over time. Ultimately, users benefit from faster innovation and support for standards allowing them to lower the cost of ownership by easily integrating multiple data types and database systems.”

Autodesk has announced that it has donated the source code for CS-Map coordinate system technology to the open source community and is seeking to establish it as part of an official OSGeo Foundation project for coordinate reference systems. The contribution represents Autodesk’s third major contribution to the open source community, following its MapGuide Open Source and Feature Data Object (FDO) Data Access Technology donations. Read More…

Autodesk announced recently that it will be working with the city of Salzburg, Austria, as the first pilot city in Autodesk’s new Digital Cities initiative. The Digital City initiative is Autodesk’s technology designed to provide a collaborative environment for visualizing, analyzing, and simulating the future impact of urban design and development at a citywide scale.

Autodesk has chosen to work with Salzburg to help it integrate its city data into a detailed 3D model of the city. Scientific personnel from Salzburg University’s Center of Geoinformation will assist with the implementation of Digital City for the city of Salzburg. This combination of city data with realistic visualization and simulation tools reportedly will allow Salzburg to view and interact with the city landscape and to analyze the impact of future urban planning, tourism, and economic development projects before they are built.

“I am very pleased to announce the launch of this pilot project which holds considerable significance for modern urban administration. With Autodesk as a leader in design innovation and the University of Salzburg drawing on its many years of experience in the geoinformation area, we have two internationally acknowledged partners joining forces to realize this future project. The digital city model will help cities like ours better understand the impact of proposed urban projects,” said Heinz Schaden, mayor of the city of Salzburg. “This type of pilot program will help us better understand how we can create an attractive and sustainable future for Salzburg and its people.”

“Salzburg is one of the most progressive, well known cities in the world and so they are a natural choice to participate as our first pilot city. Our Digital City technology can help the city and community of Salzburg communicate, collaborate, and deliver projects in a more effective — and sustainable — way,” said Lisa Campbell, vice president, Autodesk Geospatial. “We are proud to work with them and our longstanding partner, the University of Salzburg, to create a business tool that will help Salzburg plan and operate sustainable development essential for tomorrow’s high-performance cities and economies.”

Autodesk announced the latest versions of its geospatial solutions, which provide users in utility and telecommunications organizations and government agencies with a powerful, affordable and flexible geospatial platform. Read More…