Bentley has announced that it has entered into an AEC GIS Interoperability Initiative with ESRI, releasing a white paper at the same time. The effort will provide much desired interoperability between the two companies' applications.

Bentley and ESRI applications are designed for different purposes within the geospatial arena, but their users frequently maintain and use common data. Bentley's AEC users typically design, engineer, build, and operate roadways, railways, buildings, plants, networks, and other constructed assets. ESRI users, on the other hand, perform enterprise data management, decision support, cartography, planning, and analysis functions.

Interoperability is implemented at the client level and server level. The initiative will allow Bentley geospatial products to directly read a map (MXD) file and associated data from ArcGIS. ESRI will enable ArcGIS clients desktop (ArcView, ArcEditor, and ArcInfo) to directly read DGN and DWG file format.

On the server side, Bentley's management and publishing tools will support file types used by ArcGIS Desktop. This means that AEC users will be able to seamlessly access and distribute geospatial content that is stored in ArcGIS formats, as well as DGN and DWG.

The initiative will result in an 'enterprise connector' with ArcGIS that will synchronise AEC content with, and retrieve relevant GIS information from, the ArcGIS Geodatabase.

The white paper outlines in detail the benefits of the interoperability initiative on planning and analysis workflow, as well as more information on the development of each step of the initiative. Commercial delivery is planned to happen throughout 2003.

For more information contact Bentley Systems, 011 462 5811.