Reality Data generally involves dataset that are made of gigabytes or terabytes and that are growing over times as new acquisitions are done.
Reality Data, once acquired and pre-processed (ex: cleaned-up, human faces anonymization, conversion in optimized data structure) typically does not change over time and represents the state of the asset at a given instant. As opposed to Engineering data that by nature change at a high frequency during engineering project lifecycle, Reality Data itself can be considered as frozen from a data management standpoint.
Changes of the real world are tracked by new acquisition of Reality Data. Therefore, the management for the time dimension, the 4th dimension, involves new captures of the reality. Increasing the need for effective management and consumption of Reality Data over time.
Managing Reality Data strategy
Reality Data is BIG data and their management cannot be considered by duplicated data across teams without involving storage & latency issues.
Preferred strategy is to limit duplication using a centralized hosting and on-demand data streaming so only the right data is delivered to the end users.
Using ProjectWise ContextShare to overcome Reality Data Management challenges
ProjectWise ContextShare is an iTwin cloud service which provides centralized data management, waving dataset size limitation and enables serving reality data to applications and services using any format of reality data (ex: LAZ files can be hosted, managed and accessed through ProjectWise ContextShare UI and API).
It also supports effective streaming of Reality Data when these dataset are in formats that are optimized for data streaming (Web Ready Scalable Mesh, Web Ready Point Cloud etc.)