Every year the vast majority of seemingly routine street excavations occurring around the world are adversely impacted by lack of usable information about buried utility infrastructure. Large-scale construction projects are frequently stalled, incurring delay claims and change orders that significantly increase costs, because the locations of utility installations were never properly recorded or depicted. Bid costs may be increased by a minimum of 10-30% for contingencies to deal with buried unknowns. Lack of knowledge about underground built environment dependencies and vulnerabilities often stands in the way of effective disaster response and recovery.

These costs and risks could all be mitigated if accurate, comprehensive underground built environment information were available and shared between responsible parties for rapid integration and analysis. An essential first step towards achieving this capability involves developing geo-enabled utility data models with built-in capabilities for enabling data interoperability and integration. Development and adoption of such models would deliver significant benefits by improving data interchange, integration, and application readiness. phenomena. This is the goal of the OGC MUDDI (Model for Underground Data Definition and Integration) Standards Working Group.