Who benefits from GIS and CAD interoperability?
Decision makers and designers benefit the most by interoperability. Those who can define their jobs or tasks as wholly GIS or exclusively CAD drafting are less served by interoperability than those who are making decisions for design or planning based on information that may be created and accessed in one system or another. The pre-design and design phases of any project greatly benefit from interoperability. The same can be said for the as-built and planning phases, which can leverage data that may have been created in GIS or CAD. The designer will have access to the GIS base map, not a CAD copy or paper map. Parcels, soils, survey control, flood planes, and utility infrastructure will all appear inside their design environment, whether it is in GIS or CAD. If the designer has access to GIS base data such as parcels, soils, utilities, survey control, floodplains, utilities, and topography—and not merely a CAD copy or paper map of the data—he or she will be able to leverage that data t
