Increasingly there is a need to share pavement asset data beyond the Pavement Management System and GIS platforms are now commonly playing the role of data integrator across organizations.

While standard LCMS^® outputs are geotagged or georeferenced, they are not in a format that permits direct import and use in a GIS. In order to directly use data within a GIS, data must be stored in a geodatabase or spatial database format.

This new optional output for the LCMS solves this problem by converting LCMS XML pavement condition data into an ESRI Shapefile. Shapefiles are vector geodatabases that can be used to report the location, shape and attributes of geographic features. A key advantage of the Shapefile file format is that it is supported by essentially all of the commercially available GIS platforms.

This new output option generates an .shp file (containing the feature geometry), a .shx file (containing the spatial index) and a .dbf file (containing the attribute data such as cracking, roughness and rutting), in additional to the standard XML output. Shapefile outputs can be generated both on a one-to-one basis for each XML file, or as a single Shapefile for the entire survey (a Global Shapefile).