Non-standard standards

A few weekends ago my wife and I attended Shaun Farrell's 40th birthday party at the Trafalgar Tavern on the south bank of the Thames in Greenwich. Shaun is a friend who I first met when he worked at TP Bennett - and we've kept in touch through his time at Jestico + Whiles, Dyer Group and more recently at Zaha Hadid. The party was excellent - particularly the impromptu demonstrations of Latin American dancing by Shaun and Elaine! We took the opportunity to spend the whole weekend in Greenwich - a lovely part of London that I hadn't really experienced before. We visited Greenwich market on the Saturday with its many stalls run by local crafts people. On the Sunday morning we visited the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park - famous as the home of Greenwich Mean Time and the location of the Greenwich Meridian.

The Greenwich Meridian is where east meets west - zero degrees of longitude. We toured the old buildings of the Royal Observatory, some parts of which date back to Sir Christopher Wren in the 17th century, and marvelled at the old telescopes still housed there. I also have to own up to doing the typical tourist bit of standing with one foot in the east and one in the west - either side of the stainless steel line buried in the courtyard marking the meridian!

The Autumn sun was shining down on us. However my confidence that all was right with the world and everything was in its correct place was about to be upset. Just before we left the Observatory I noticed a small white card on a wall in the room housing the original "Transit Circle" telescope. The card stated that all modern global positioning systems use a different location for their prime meridian - which turned out to be over 300 feet to the east of the traditional location and close to some benches where families were at that moment having their picnic lunches.

It turns out that there are actually lots of definitions of the "prime meridian" - which is typically what you end up with when you have many people and organisations attempting to define an arbitrary standard.

Apart from a feeling of being conned, it also reminded me of the same sort of frustration that many of us feel when trying to agree on a standard for managing construction project information. I have copies of "CAD Standard" documents from many firms on the shelf in my study at home - all of them similar in their aim of defining a single, agreed standard to aid in collaboration and eliminating errors and confusion on projects. However all of them are subtly different - particularly when it comes to naming conventions for CAD layers and file names.

At least with Newforma Project Center our users can use its wildcard searching and filtering tools to manage and control project information, whatever "standard" (or lack of one) the information was originally based on.

View from the Greenwich Royal Observatory looking north along the Greenwich Meridian towards the Maritime Museum and London's Canary Wharf financial area.