I was at the UC, and visited the ESRI-CAD support booth. ESRI employee suggested I ask here...
So, I work for a smallish city that gets their new municipal infrastructure data (water, sewer, streets, signs, storm, etc) from CAD as-built drawings from engineering firms that mange the project and design for us.
Via our city engineering standards we required designs to be submitted to us in NAD83 MT State Plane, international feet. So, importing the .dwg file is not a problem.
What is the problem is that the various engineers that design these projects typically have up to 50 or so layers (some on, some off) and it's difficult on some resultant as-built drawings export whole CAD layers as either "new water", "new sewer". etc. You usually end up many CAD layers that define a certain piece of infrastructure. Coupled with this, there are usually other layers that tend to clutter the display - and finding which one is which to shut off sometimes becomes a chore.
As a result, our current workflow to get this data into our GIS is to heads-up digitize it from the CAD data. It's a colossal pain, and not efficient.
Reaching out to see what other methods small (and low man-powered) city govt are doing to get data like this in their GIS. ESRI employee recommended we enforce CAD "standards" to get our engineering partners to at least submit their design in a format that's easier to use. If that's the case, some examples of those, or DWG templates would help?
then do a check with data reviewer?
Any ideas?
