3D PDFs for Geospatial Data Reporting

Geospatial data is becoming an increasingly important component in decision making
processes and planning efforts across a broad range of industries and information sectors.
Thus, there is a need to share 3D geologic models for collaboration with peers and clients.
Proprietary software can be expensive and complex to install for such purposes. However,
everyone can easily view a PDF document on low cost platforms. The proposed technology
enables organisations & institutions across the globe to deliver and share 3D geospatial
models supporting technical information in the PDF format. Current 3D pdf tools for
producing 3D PDF reports suffer from the following issues which we aim to overcome: poor
compression, loss of attributes, loss of geo-location coordinate systems, and lack of geo-aware
3D measurement features. Geospatial is growing dramatically; data is becoming
overwhelming and big data has become a new subject in the computing field. There are the
issues of security, privacy, collaboration of datasets, ownership of data and issues with
aggregating the massive amount of crowd-sourced data.
Visual Technology Services Ltd (VTS) aim to bring their basic PDF3D engineering tool to the
geospatial data reporting market, allowing the easy use of 3D PDFs over various file formats
and co-ordinate systems, with a range of functionality, market need proven with a completed
TSB Proof of Market project output. Key benefit is to enable complex and large geospatial
models to become highly portable and viewable on zero cost platforms across multiple
devices. Innovation lies in the fact that the 3D PDF will overcome issues that current
alternative software on the market has, such as poor compression, loss of attributes, loss of
geo-location coordinate systems, and lack of geo-aware 3D measurement features. Thus using
PDF3D will enable the cost effective sharing of accurate data without the loss of any features
or information.