“I’m a huge fan of getting to my data and not reinventing the wheel,” says DOTD’s assistant geotechnical engineer administrator Jesse Rauser, who played a key role in his department’s transition from gINT, a Bentley geotechnical data management and reporting tool, over to OpenGround. “For example, one product is a [Microsoft] Excel extension. Now I can go there and grab any boring data I want and drop it into a spreadsheet. I don’t have to recreate it every time.”

The agency can create tools that bring in test borings and do a site characterization, he adds. “Another tool is a way to do subsurface investigation requests. I’ve set it up so if you’re going to start a project, the borings will already be in the database—a preliminary version of the borings with depths, special instructions and proposed locations. I can go into the Excel extension, drop it into a spreadsheet, pull in vicinity maps and create a standardized form for the data put into the system. Once it comes back, we just update locations and depths.”

In a case study for Seequent, he added that it costs at least $15,000 per soil boring for a bridge foundation, so preserving the data from these borings eliminates the need to revisit the site and drill additional holes. “Our boring request form easily saves 30 minutes to an hour on every single project, and the tools we’ve built to visualize data and for statistical analysis, saves at least an hour per project,” he stated in the case study.

Seequent says that the DOTD example “paves the way” for other state transportation agencies to do similar work, but did not specify which ones may be trying to do so. Carl Grice, Seequent director of geotechnical information management, says that OpenGround is currently used by over 21,000 users, managing more than 6.25 million boreholes globally.

DOTD’s next goal is to incorporate AI to categorize data and create a public portal, says Rauser. “Taxpayers paid for this stuff, so we would love to make it so.”