Interview with Qiu Guanyong; Organize Li Chunyang

The city, as a land, carries people's hopes for survival, ideals of life, and the driving force of production, and is closely related to human interests. And the planning, layout, construction, development, and resource utilization of a city cannot be separated from one word - urban geology. It can be said that urban geology plays an important role as a guarantor in the development of a city.

With the advent of the information age, the development direction of urban geology is self-evident - urban geological research must be combined with informatization. The GIS industry is increasingly being applied to urban geological work, and 3D GIS has emerged as a new force, providing a visual representation of urban geological structures.

To maximize the effectiveness of 3D GIS and safeguard urban development, it cannot be limited to visualization, but should leverage its powerful analytical capabilities for practical applications. The Suzhou 3D urban geological survey project, which was completed at the end of last year, has well adhered to this concept and achieved many results. As the main participant, Gong Xulong, the director of Jiangsu Geological Survey Institute, has more say in this regard.

When urban geology encounters informatization

It is very important to understand the foundation of a city, that is, the geological situation of the city. Why do we say this? Because the specific geological situation of a city determines its layout and construction direction. For example, whether a city can develop a mining industry, whether it has good conditions to support urban buildings, whether it has suitable soil and moisture to maintain the ecological environment, etc., all rely on urban geological surveys. "At the beginning of the interview, Director Gong emphasized to the reporter the important role of urban geology in urban construction.

We live and exist on the land of cities, and the geological environment of cities is closely related to the interests of everyone. Currently, in some cities in China, overexploitation of groundwater due to industrial development has led to land subsidence, seriously affecting production and daily life; In addition, geological disasters such as landslides and mudslides also threaten urban construction and development. This requires full research on urban geology, consideration of resource endowment, and awareness of rational utilization of resources in urban construction. In this way, the selection, layout, and construction of urban planning sites can be scientific and guaranteed. Overall, urban geological research provides safety and resource guarantees for the construction and development of cities and the geological environment, and its significance cannot be underestimated.

GIS, as an information technology, has been increasingly applied in the field of geological research. Nowadays, many cities are creating urban geological data centers, which Gong Xulong vividly compares to "urban digital geological data archives". The construction of data centers has made data management more centralized, and geological workers' analysis and research more convenient and efficient.

In addition, GIS also provides an efficient platform for urban geological research, especially by providing an information technology combined with auxiliary tools, greatly improving work efficiency. For example, in terms of drawing, the previous manual drawing was time-consuming, laborious, and cumbersome; Nowadays, with the adoption of automation and customization technology, automatic and high-speed mapping can be achieved through databases, freeing researchers from some tedious work.

Previously, geological work was often disconnected from government management and urban construction, but now information technology is being integrated into urban geological research work. Through intuitive display methods, digital survey results are provided to the government to assist in decision-making and quickly receive feedback, ultimately achieving benefits. "During the conversation, Gong Xulong believed that combining information technology with urban geological research is extremely beneficial for both the government and the public.

3D GIS, abstract to concrete

In the objective world, the geological structure itself is three-dimensional, but in the past, it was limited by traditional geographic information technology and could not be expressed intuitively. It was mostly equivalent to a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional entity, and the effect was not ideal; Meanwhile, with the increasing role of GIS in database and map planning. Introducing 3D GIS into urban geological work is even more logical.

The introduction of 3D GIS into urban geological research was first adopted abroad and only began in China in the 1990s. Since 2003, when the government provided considerable support in the field of virtual reality technology, 3D GIS has embarked on a rapid development track. Some domestic GIS manufacturers and software platforms are developing urban geological 3D platform tools.

The competition of thousands of sails and hundreds of boats is certainly inspiring, but ultimately, the development of 3D platform tools still depends on technical strength. Director Gong also put forward his own opinions on the selection of 3D GIS platform from both technical and practical perspectives.

Nowadays, applications have entered the three-dimensional level, which is very different from traditional two-dimensional. Currently, what I value is multi data fusion. The platform can provide three-dimensional space for various data fusion, such as geophysical exploration, drilling, and some traditional survey data, all of which can be fused on the platform. Another is the integration of two and three dimensions and their mutual conversion. Nowadays, three-dimensional is often talked about, but three-dimensional GIS and two-dimensional are not in the same defined space and cannot be achieved through a single window. The functions of three-dimensional often rely on two-dimensional support, so the integration of two and three dimensions is also a technical challenge that needs to be overcome at present

In reality, we also encounter some difficulties in the three-dimensional field. Taking our current project in Suzhou as an example, when conducting three-dimensional modeling and data processing, it involves many organisms and requires operations based on specific set elements. This is too complicated and inefficient for geological workers to operate. Therefore, a higher degree of automation is also what we hope for

Nowadays, some GIS companies are developing 3D tools for urban mining applications. I think this is very advantageous because the objective geological world itself is three-dimensional, and many things used to be only imaginable in the minds of geological researchers. Now, they can be directly expressed with tools, and the use is still quite significant

3D GIS landing in Suzhou, blooming and yielding brilliant results

3D GIS tools should not be limited to empty talk and research, but more importantly, they should be rooted in the "soil" of real geological work, allowing the utility of 3D GIS to "blossom and bear fruit".

In September 2009, the Suzhou 3D Urban Geology Project, jointly launched by the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Land and Resources, Suzhou Municipal Bureau of Land and Resources, and Wuhan Zhongdi Digital Technology Co., Ltd., has passed the review and achieved outstanding results in four aspects: firstly, by collecting geological information, the Suzhou Urban Geology Data Center has been established to effectively manage relevant data; The second is to successfully establish a geological professional work platform, providing visual processing and professional analysis of various professional data; Thirdly, a three-dimensional urban geological structure model of Suzhou has been established; Fourthly, it provides information sharing and services for government departments and the general public in a B/S manner.

The significant achievements are inspiring and also indicate that the introduction of GIS based information technology into urban geological work is a wise move. Through Director Gong's introduction, we also learned that urban geological projects have been carried out in cities such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Tianjin. Compared to these cities, the Suzhou project has multiple innovative aspects, which can be described as shining brightly.

Firstly, our database has developed some automated error checking tools that can perform logical error checking; it can also automatically import data formats from various professional software into the database and establish automatic monitoring tools. Secondly, through the development of tools, we can automatically standardize massive engineering data in field construction, greatly improving our standardization efficiency. Thirdly, based on the urban geological database, we have built a multi-disciplinary evaluation model library in Suzhou, which can edit a method, establish a method library through stacking, hierarchical analysis, and calculation, and integrate this method library with the database to form automated modeling. Some professional evaluations can be automated using our information to generate evaluation result partition maps

In terms of 3D modeling, the Suzhou 3D Urban Geology Project has also made many breakthroughs. It has developed automated modeling based on geological information and created a modeling method that can objectively reflect the structure of geological bodies. In addition, it can automatically call other open geological base maps, and our geographical base maps can also be called by others. These innovations are not yet available in other cities

At present, Zhenjiang has taken over the work of the 3D urban geology project, and Xuzhou is also about to carry out this project. Compared to the Suzhou project, Zhenjiang has its prominent characteristics: Suzhou is mainly composed of plains, with few mountainous areas; The low mountains and hills in Zhenjiang account for more than 60% of the city's area, so the characteristics and increment of informationized geological data are greatly different. And this puts forward higher requirements for geological information systems, 3D data storage management, and the presentation of 3D effects.

Urban geological informatization, openness is the key to long-term development

The sea embraces all rivers, and tolerance is great. The philosophical wisdom of ancient people is still immensely beneficial to modern people. Only by emphasizing openness and inclusiveness can everything develop in the long run. At the end of the interview, Gong Xulong talked about his expectations for the construction of urban geological informatization, and his ideas are also in line with the wisdom of ancient people:

One is that all institutional data can be shared, and the other is that data can be updated constantly. Whether serving the national or provincial level, there should be a non-profit geological unit that can continuously update relevant geological survey results into the urban geological system in a timely manner, so that geological survey results can be intuitively and quickly used for urban planning, construction, geological environment, and resource management services, and geological work can enter the mainstream of government management decision-making. To achieve the clustering and industrialization of the entire geological information and better play its benefits, it is meaningless to isolate it, and it needs to be constantly updated, shared and integrated

Gong Xulong, Director of the Institute of Environmental Geology at Jiangsu Geological Survey and Research Institute