Geospatial Information Technolo

Geospatial Perspectives From One of Todays Most Influe n

FIG has an official presence in more than
110 countries and as such is recognized
as a leading representative by many UN
agencies. In this regard, what do you
see as FIGs role in the global economy?
Holger Magel (HM): The role of FIG has
increased remarkably during the last four
years, to the point where we are truly a global
federation. This is not just the result of a
membership expansion (more than 20 new
member associations) but also because of the
focus of our work and the actions we have
taken. Today FIG is a major partner, or as it
has even been expressed, a premium partner
for example with the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) and UN-Habitat, on all
issues related to land and property. This is
partly because FIG is the only truly internation-
al National Government Organization (NGO) in
this field, which is composed of both aca-
demics and practitioners.
Our success is based on our own activities in
promoting secure tenure, sustainability and the
UN Millennium Development Goals. The role of
land issues has increased dramatically now
that the international community and national
governments recognize the importance of
tenure in solving the economic and social
problems in developing countries: without
secure tenure there is no investment and no
economic progress. In technical fields we work
in close cooperation with other international
organizations. FIG also has expertise in com-
bining technical and GIS knowledge to man-
agement issues, which are of tremendous ben-
efit. I am happy that FIG was in the first row
when we established the Joint Board of
Geospatial Information Societies (JBGIS) in
Cairo, in 2005, which I am currently chairing.
What is the biggest challenge facing FIG
in todays climate of global urbanization
in what is often referred to as the
urban-rural divide?
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6
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At the end of December 2006, Prof. Dr-Ing Holger Magel will bring his tenure as the President of FIG for the past four years, to a
close. Magel has played, and continues to play, a significant part in championing the role of the surveyor in todays global
geospatial community. GeoInformatics asked him his views on the future of the profession and the challenges facing FIG today.
by Frank Arts
Holger Magel: Personally I am very happy with the progress FIG has made as an international body and as the global mother of all surveyors and surveying .
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:47 Pagina 6
HM: Perhaps the biggest contribution that
FIG has brought to this discussion is that
problems in urban growth cannot be solved
in the cities alone. Instead, a new kind of
dialogue is needed between those actors in
urban and rural areas and the concrete
actions of joint development. Ongoing argu-
ment on this topic should be replaced with
fruitful cooperation. Traditionally the urban
and rural issues have been discussed in dif-
ferent fora. The truth is that the biggest
problems facing humankind are in mega
cities, especially in Africa and Asia, and are
primarily a result of migration from rural
areas. Therefore, we have to solve both the
problems found in the countryside and the
challenges of the urban slums. Since the
Regional Conference 2003 in Morocco, FIG
has started to focus on the topic of rural-
urban-interrelationship and has published
the important Marrakech Declaration. The
other factor that needs much more attention
is how we can solve the challenges in
coastal zones. Most of the worlds popula-
tion lives in cities and a large part will be
living in coastal areas that are expected to
face a big threat from global climate change.
You recently attended the Geoinformatics
2006 conference in Wuhan, China.
As a country much in the public eye
with a thriving economic engine and
tremendous growth potential, what is
the current status of Chinas geospatial
industry?
HM: I was impressed by the high standard of
the Chinese GIS and ICT community, which
was demonstrated at this, now very interna-
tional, conference. The best proof of growing
Chinese expertise and its worldwide appreci-
ation are experts like Vincent Tao, who has
studied in Wuhan and who is now working
with Microsoft in Seattle, and responsible for
Virtual Earth. I could mention some other
Chinese colleagues who are working in the
States or elsewhere thus demonstrating the
changed status of China. Let me cite a
European scientist with worldwide reputa-
tion, who said to me on the occasion of the
impressive Geoinformatics conference 2006:
If you want to see the future of and the
driving forces in Geoinformation you have to
go to Asia, especially to China.
sion also has to broaden its range of activities
and education. That was my message at the
50th Anniversary celebration of the (former)
Wuhan Technical University for Surveying and
Mapping in October 2006.
From an educational standpoint, how do
you see the future of surveying,
particularly with the rapid technological
advances being made in measurement,
positioning and imaging systems?
HM: During my terms as FIG Vice- and as
President I have often spoken about the broad
basis in the surveying education and profes-
sion. Academics in this profession should have
a broad education and at the same time go
into details in certain field of expertise. It is
true that the demand for traditional field sur-
veyors will go down (due to black boxes) and
that this work will mostly be done by crafts-
men with lower education. We need however
to remember that there will always be a need
for engineering surveyors, geodesists, GIS,
land management and other experts in a lot of
state, private, business and even societal sec-
tors. Our strength in the future will be in com-
bining technical skills and social and manage-
rial skills. The need for improved management
skills is number one in merging markets, and
to get a better public and social reputation
surveyors need more awareness and openness
to politics and society. They have to better
understand the world.
Various geospatial disciplines, such as
surveying, photogrammetry, GIS, and
geodesy, are merging under the
Geomatics umbrella. Do you see
individual identities and industry
expertise being lost as a result,
particularly with todays emphasis on
automation across the industry?
HM: As mentioned I am not sure whether the
trend to describe the whole profession as
geomatics is completely correct (for Germany
for example I would deny this completely) and
that this will be the real trend also in the
future. Most of the disciplines involved in geo-
matics are per se multidisciplinary. Of course,
as automation moves on, all disciplines
involved in geomatics are refocusing their
fields of work but I dont see any individual
In recent years there has been a decline
in the enrollment of students entering
the Geomatics field. Can you attribute a
reason for this?
HM: One of the main concerns in FIG is how to
attract more students and young people to the
profession. This was why I visited the
International Geodetic Students Meeting (IGSM)
in Cracow, Poland, this year encouraging the
students to join FIG events much more. It was
really great that we had many more students
at FIG 2006 in Munich than ever before. Our
problem is that we have had too few students
for many years at least in developed coun-
tries. The basic problem is that we have to
compete with other professions that sometimes
are, or at least look, more fashionable. And the
basic public infrastructures and private houses,
which have to be measured, are already built.
Students are very well aware of the employ-
ment market and trends in the job market, and
of the attractiveness of a job.
Surveyors have not been successful in market-
ing their profession. There is even an unclear
profile or wrong image of a merely cadastre
surveyor and the image of a job with less influ-
ence. Too few students know that there are
many attractive fields in the surveying branch
such as in real estate management and
GIS/GIM or outer space activities. Traditional
surveying has not been that attractive. To me
the question is not that much about defini-
tions: surveying is still a good term and after
the first boom of launching geomatics it has
not really changed the interest in the market.
That has also happened in Germany. We
should indicate much more clearly that there is
also a big demand for surveyors in mature
markets because so many surveyors will be
retiring in Europe during the next 5-10 years.
The profession has to be promoted as being
more attractive and rewarding as a profession
of well-grounded specialized generalists.
More than ever we publicly should demon-
strate our large range of responsibilities, activi-
ties and related education according to my
favourite metaphor: from the single parcel to
the planet Mars. There are chances for every-
body. When discussing the Western European
and US situation where we have had too few
students for many years we often forget that
the profession is very attractive in most devel-
oping economies. But even there the profes-
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
7
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o gy a Means to More Democracy
e ntial Figures
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:47 Pagina 7
industry expertise lost at all. Even with rapid
technological changes in individual professions
they still have their own characters.
Cooperation of professions is an ongoing
trend. A solid education including IT and math-
ematics are the common ground for all these
professions. The cooperation among geospa-
tial sciences, as I have mentioned earlier, is
well established on an international level
(JBGIS is an impressive example).
Geoinformation is something that will be need-
ed in almost all professions and it will not be
an umbrella only for traditional land-related
professions. Geoinformation is a tool which is
used more and more by everybody and not
just seen as the identity of one particular pro-
fession. There must be more: such as the
identity of a land manager who uses GIS or
the identity of a valuer who also uses GIS etc.
Why do you think it has taken so long
for business and government to recog-
nize GIS technology as a mainstream
information tool?
HM: GIS technology has been well recognized
for at least 10 years but most of the efforts
and investments have addressed only the level
of single departments or single institutions. In
recently overcoming the silo mentality there is
now added value in institutional cooperation
on different administrative levels on different
scales. Let me demonstrate a popular exam-
ple: IMAGI in Germany is aiming at Spatial
Information infrastructure on a national level
similar to the activities on European level
(INSPIRE-initiative) and on a global level
(Global Monitoring for Environment and
Security, GMES). All that requires a cooperation
of institutions across professional boundaries.
On the other hand GIS has always been very
demanding as far as hardware resources, the
(financial) effort for collecting (purchasing)
geospatial data, and personnel training are
concerned. Therefore GIS has for a long time
been a tool for specialists. Web technology
and free access to spatial data help leverage
GIS technology. GIS is now an accepted tech-
nology and is on its way to becoming a mass
media. We can also blame ourselves as we
have been speaking technology instead of
politics or the language of decision-makers
and media. That should be a serious warning
for our profession. The topic of Land
Information Systems (LIS) had already been
discussed in 1978 at a FIG seminar of commis-
sion 3 in Darmstadt, Germany. But it was all
too introverted. Nobody realized that surveyors
belonged to the pioneers of LIS and GIS.
Geospatial Information for Sustainable
Development was a key focus in your
address at Map Asia, 2006. Was it aimed
primarily at developing economies or do
you think it also has relevance globally?
HM: My address at Map Asia was not only
aimed at developing economies. In any
country a high percentage of political decisions
has a spatial component and impacts the
environment. Making good decisions requires
access to high quality geospatial information.
Today, more and more spatial information and
related technologies are available to all citi-
zens (GIS-non-experts). Access to geospatial
information means empowering citizens
because they are better informed about their
environment, can better assess the effects of
political decisions and have therefore a better
background for political participation a key
prerequisite for sustainable development. My
message for the developing countries is that
spatial information is a key infrastructure simi-
lar to road networks 100 years ago. Countries
with lower GDP are more often wasting their
resources by not tuning investments in spatial
information. The issue that I also want to raise
when discussing developing countries is the
role of good governance in relation to GIS
and promoting sustainable development.
Geospatial Information Technology is even a
means to more democracy.
What do you see as the major trends
developing within todays geospatial
community - where is the industry
headed in the next 10 years?
HM: Geospatial information is on the way to
breaking out of the innovation centres man-
aged by technicians and will be of common
use. In 10 years from now the mainstream will
be to use spatial information for decision-mak-
ing, similar to the trend 10 years ago when
everybody got a mobile phone. These tools for
The need for improved management skills is number one in merging
markets, and to get a better public and social reputation surveyors
need more awareness and openness to politics and society. They have
to better understand the world.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:47 Pagina 8
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
9
decision-making do not only apply to data
(like Google Earth), but also to tools for mov-
ing in space (navigation) and managing time
in space (observing and forecasting trends). In
10 years from now nobody will have the
excuse of not knowing local and global trends
in our environment - similar to the major
improvements in weather forecasting of today.
Technical trends include web GIS (including
Earth Viewers such as Google Earth) and GNSS
and (airborne) laser scanning as effective data
acquisition techniques. I think that we could
even become better prepared for disaster and
risk management.
On other issues the level of professional edu-
cation will increase, moving from educating
surveyors to educating surveyors and man-
agers. The role of land administration, includ-
ing new tools for tenure in developing coun-
tries and of comprehensive and actively
shaping land management, will be the focus.
We will also see an increase in so-called low
cost technologies.
Our societies need more participatory plan-
ning, more options, more transparency and
thus better decision-making, in order to
become sustainable. Seeing a trend in time is
the precondition for measures on prepared-
ness. The industry is ahead because it earlier
and better knows the challenges and needs of
politics, societies and markets. The professions
must waste no time in preparing methods for
proper tuning of tools with data and how to
incorporate these into planning and decision-
making on a political level.
Shaping the Change has been the
motto of your FIG presidency. In the last
four years has there been any one
solution or particular development that
best exemplifies that phrase?
HM: In todays complex world there are no
unique solutions or receipts. What we have
been doing is to get surveyors to be better
prepared to face global changes like globaliza-
tion, environmental changes, increasing civil
society, a need for better education and life-
long learning (Continuous Professional
Development), the free movement of labour
and the need for standards of qualification.
From the achievements of the FIG Council dur-
ing the past four years I would like to pick the
improved cooperation with sister organizations
such as the International Association of
Geodesy (IAG), International Society for
Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS),
International Cartographic Association (ICA),
and the United Nations (UN), together with
some new projects such as those related to
disaster risk management and land tenure pro
poor. Furthermore the growing awareness with-
in our membership of the need for broadening
surveyors activities and education. According to
the changed challenges to our profession, we
have amended our FIG definition of a surveyor.
Personally I am very happy with the progress
FIG has made as an international body and as
the global mother of all surveyors and survey-
ing. This progress has been well received by
academicians and practitioners. We have
achieved a high standard and professionalism
for our events and work, and have restruc-
tured our internal organisation with a highly
efficient working FIG Director, and a separate
office responsible for administration. As men-
tioned we have a lot of new members and
much bigger attendance to our meetings. The
Munich FIG with INTERGEO Congress 2006 has
marked new records. This increases the status
of FIG in speaking to world leaders and pro-
vides a good basis for the next FIG President
and Council.
Frank Arts (fartes@geoinformatics.com) is a
contributing editor of GeoInformatics.
For more information visit www.fig.net and
www.landentwicklung-muenchen.de.
I nt er vi ew
The truth is that the biggest problems facing
humankind are in mega cities, especially in Africa
and Asia, and are primarily a result of migration
from rural areas. Therefore, we have to solve both the
problems found in the countryside and the challenges
of the urban slums.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 16:06 Pagina 9
Report on London Autodesk Co
A Real Sense of Integration
The London Autodesk Conference 2006 on the 25th of October was organised as a
general event, with all vertical divisions present: Manufacturing, Building,
Infrastructure and Media & Entertainment. During the morning programme, some 600
attendees listened to a strategic overview from Autodesk CEO Carl Bass, followed by a
vertical update with Autodesk specialists including Chris Bradshaw (Infrastructure) and
Pete Baxter (Building) bringing it all together. There was some information on
Autodesks subscriptions programme to close off the morning.
By Remco Takken
Macro-economic Trends
According to Autodesk CEO Carl Bass there are
five macro-economic trends in how we do
business today. In short these trends are: the
growth of the middle class, the rise of the so-
called emerging economies, the global infras-
tructure boom, the demand for sustainable
design and lastly a phenomenon that Bass
called the digital life. In 2009, it is estimated
that we will spend 10 hours a day using digital
media, be it computers, blackberries, games
and so on. This has recently been highlighted
by the fact that Google paid 1.6 billion US
Dollars for YouTube. With around one million
new videos a day, phenomenal amounts of
people are visiting and using this popular site
where people can upload their own home
made movies.
Focusing on the growth of the middle class,
Bass said: We have a growing amount of
consumers with a choice. These people have
enough money to be able to choose great
design in order to differentiate themselves
from others.
Bass uses the term sustainable design inter-
changibly with green design. With our popu-
lation growth it becomes obvious that we
should be thinking ahead when it comes to
energy. In this realm, people always point to
the automobile as energy consumer number
one, but approximately seventy percent of all
energy use is consumed in buildings. This
includes the raw materials used, electricity,
wood and so forth. In China an entirely green
skyscraper is being built by the architects of
SOM and in Alberta, Canada, there is a firm
committed to building only sustainable build-
ings.
Talking about infrastructure, Bass foresees a
global boom. Of course we will always be
building roads, railways and pipelines. This
will expand onto the emerging countries as
well. When you add to that the ageing of the
workforce, the ageing of existing infrastructure
and the increasing capacity and need for bet-
ter security of ports, you might consider your-
self lucky when you have a job in infrastruc-
ture. You will have sufficient work for the rest
of your life.
Hiring the Right People
During the afternoon Infrastructure sessions,
Autodesks Bradshaw takes up this notion
when he remarks on the abundance of work
and the scarcity of people. And I dont see it
changing. The biggest business problem will
be hiring the right people. It all comes down
to the age of the babyboomers. You can see it
coming. In 1998 a mere 33 percent of our
workforce consisted of over 45s, in 2008 this
will be a full 51 percent. This will have a big
impact on retirement. However, China and
India dont have this problem they have
tremendous amounts of engineering profes-
sionals.
Bradshaw sees how the western world will
increasingly rely on either outsourcing, or
investing in new employees. This neatly fits
into his view of the governments and private
sectors reliance on contracting. What we see
is that more and more we will have to pay a
private company before we can drive our cars
any further. These firms will operate and man-
age the roads. The inevitable expansion of
private firms, in Bradshaws view, comes as no
surprise in this light.
December 2006
10
Conf er ences & Meet i ngs
CEO Carl Bass: There are five macro-economic trends in how we do business today.
The London Autodesk Conference
2006 gave many attendees
the insight that all design can
be more effective when
engineered and visualised in
3-D with natural connections
to its map location.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 09:21 Pagina 10
In his short update in the morning, Bradshaw
emphasized the importance of infrastructure:
We couldnt have gotten here if we didnt
have the roads, railways and airports. And we
wouldnt have the lights, we wouldnt have the
electricity.
Tips, Tricks and Open Source
With Lynda Stoner from Autodesk showing
Map3D tips and tricks during the conference, it
became clear that Autodesk is rapidly growing
into a geospatial provider to be reckoned
with. She showed how to attach data from
databases to Autodesks DWG-files in the Map
Explorer. Classic GIS features like putting new
objects directly in the right map layer prove
that Autodesk is learning the GIS game.
Mike Saunt from Astun Technology Ltd enlight-
ened the closed source Autodesk users in the
audience with his view on Autodesks recent
move into Open Source (OS) mapping. He
confirmed that big companies like Yahoo, IBM
and Google fully embrace OS, and that the city
of Munich in Germany had switched some
14,000 computers from Windows to Linux in
order to use OS. He said: Autodesk gained a
lot of trust in the Open Source Community by
joining. To us, Mapserver is seen as best and
most proven, though. Autodesks MapGuide is
just the new kid on the block, with a good
chance of growing in this community.
Topobase
Although it is not really a new product,
Topobase 2007 was presented as such.
Autodesk fairly recently acquired this applica-
the power of the application is in the data and
the database. There are standard vertical mod-
ules for water, wastewater, electric, gas, land
and survey.
At this moment, Topobase has around 500
users. This seems to be mainly due to the fact
that it is a product that is not well-known.
Also, the importance of data structure and
consistency is only beginning to emerge now
data is starting to be used through the whole
enterprise.
A Lot of Ground
The London Autodesk Conference covered a
lot of ground, looking after users of architec-
ture, infrastructure, engineering and building
solutions in different break-out sessions.
Whatever lectures or workshops attended,
there was a real sense of integration. This
event gave many attendees the insight that all
design can be more effective when engineered
and visualised in 3-D with natural connections
to its map location. From here you can man-
age and maintain data, and make sure that
whatever it is that you have built, it will be
there for a very long time.
Remco Takken (rtakken@geoinformatics.com) is a
contributing editor of GeoInformatics. For more
information visit www.autodesk.com.
tion when it took over Swiss based C-Plan, a
former partner and its original developer. As
we are just beginning to understand the
importance of the fact that Civil 3D shares
data with Map 3D and MapGuide, we now
have Topobase running on top of these, doing
the infrastructure management for utilities,
municipalities and engineering firms.
Seen this way, Topobase can best be regarded
as close family to Laser-Scans Radius Suite. It
maintains the proper relations and topology
between assets. Each module has a data
model, workflows and business rules as well
as multiple display models. As with Radius,
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
11
Conf er ences & Meet i ngs
o nference 2006
Chris Bradshaw (Infrastructure) remarked on the
abundance of work and the scarcity of people.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 09:21 Pagina 11
Integration SAP and GIS for Re a
Location of Properties in a Geospatial Way
In the working field of Real Estate geospatial information is an important information component that supports business processes
and decision making. In the last decade many profit, non-profit and governmental organisations implemented an Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) Business Information System such as SAP R/3. This type of ERP shows the what and how, the administrative
side of an information system. The where -the location of the properties in a geospatial way- is unknown. To solve this issue,
administrative and geospatial data have to be related. Nowadays, techniques such as service oriented architecture and web-services,
support the optimal linking of these data flows. The Dutch State Property Service, as the representative of the government as owner
of real estate property, integrated with Bentley as the solution provider GIS into SAP based on these new techniques.
A new and future proof solution is developed. This article describes the project, its solution and results as well as the suitability for
other organisations.
By Sebastiaan Sintemaartensdijk and Matty Lakerveld
Business Information System: ERP
In 2001 the State Property Service decided to
replace the old information system and busi-
ness processes by a new and improved sys-
tem. The implementation project that was
set up was divided into three phases.
Phase 1 covered a new and integrated busi-
ness information system based on SAP R/3
technology as well as an improved and
redesigned business process. The SAP R/3
implementation supports the entire organisa-
tion and its business processes (such as real
estate, property administration, financial
administration) in an administrative way. The
system is based on integration technology
and service oriented architecture. The new
business information system is based on
standard functionality of SAP and process
related functions such as R(eal) E(state) and
P(roject) S(ystems).
Phase 2 focused on improving business pro-
cesses, organisation and system as well as
implementing the management report tool of
SAP R/3 (SAP Business Warehouse).
In every day life, the value of real estate
objects not only depends on these descrip-
tive data, but also on their geospatial fea-
tures as absolute values (like boundaries
and area) as well as relative location. SAP
only stores administrative data. For the com-
pleteness and accuracy of the real estate
properties in the SAP administration there
was also a need for linking this data to their
December 2006
12
Ar t i cl e
Figure 1: GIS solutions.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:48 Pagina 12
corresponding location and cadastral
(geospatial and administrative) data. This
linking leads to visualizing the state property
and showing the corresponding administra-
tive SAP data. Realization of this need led to
phase 3.
Need for GIS Functions
The lacking in geospatial data and the link
with administrative data lead to reduced
support of business processes and decision
making. For example locations of the proper-
ties and user rights are only known in a
descriptive way, therefore exact area calcula-
tions and cadastral data are unknown. Also a
lack of vacancy information was another
issue. The State Property Service was not
able to fulfil contract management of real
estate objects in an optimal way which
affected the revenues. Optimizing this sup-
port produced a need for 5 geospatial func-
tions.
The first function is relating cadastral infor-
mation (geospatial and administrative) and
state property information. The geospatial
cadastral information displays the state prop-
erty parcels and the neighbouring parcels
with a total amount of 2.5 million parcels in
vector format widespread over the
Netherlands. As stated earlier, not only abso-
lute features of the objects such as bound-
aries and area are important, but also the
relative location itself. The situation and
position of the user rights (such as rental
and long-lease contracts) related to the
cadastral and state property information is
the second GIS function. A derivative need of
the two functions mentioned before is the
possibility of plotting changes in property
rights, for example by digitizing acquired and
alienated real estate objects and user rights.
The user rights, such as rental and long-
lease contracts, were only registered in an
administrative way. To relate property and
user rights with cadastral geospatial data,
the user rights had to be digitalized as well.
The last function is the possibility to
maintenance and retrieval of all geospatially
enabled real estate information. The mainte-
nance of the geospatial data is carried out at
remote locations by employees dedicated to
a specific area.
The three solutions with (solution and pro-
ject) guidelines such as future proof, scal-
able, web services and user-friendliness
including other best practices were translat-
ed in a business case. It appeared that all
the available GIS solutions on the market
have SAP linking solutions based on the
application paradigm. The State Property
Service decided to implement the data inte-
gration solution based on Bentley software
and solutions. Bentley offered a solution that
was in accordance with the guidelines as
well their earlier realization of a comparable
solution at the Dutch Rail Road Real Estate
Division.
SAP-GIS Integrated Solution
For the implementation of the GIS solution,
the project focused on two phases: goals for
phase 1 were delivering an overall design
and demonstrating the design in a proof of
concept. Next to the business case the proof
of concept should be showing the possibility
of the GIS integration. After a positive proof
of concept the total solution was implement-
ed and delivered in April 2006 as phase 2.
The GIS-SAP solution is divided into front-
end, back-end and mid-end. The front-end is
based on a user-interface that combines
exchange geospatial information with other
(governmental) real estate organisations. By
using standardized formats (NEN, GML) the
State Property Service is able to exchange
(add or deliver) geospatial data. For filling in
these functions there were three different GIS
solutions to consider.
GIS Solutions
The three GIS solutions are illustrated in fig-
ure 1. In the data solution every end-user
has a GIS application and SAP R/3 at his dis-
posal. These systems are fully separated
with data maintenance issues as a result.
Every user has to be educated in the usage
of the GIS tools. The application solution is
the same solution as the data solution with
that difference that administrative and
geospatial data are linked at the application
level, which is very costly in system mainte-
nance.
The GIS and SAP application make the link
between administrative and geospatial data
instead of the end user. The integration solu-
tion has one user interface for combining
geospatial and administrative data in one
view and steers the workflow process for
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
13
Ar t i cl e
e al Estate Management
Data integration is a new and future proof solution that fits
completely in ICT developments such as service oriented
architecture and web-services.
Figure 2: GIS-SAP integration architecture.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:48 Pagina 13
geospatial and administrative data integrated
in the SAP user-interface. This user interface
is realized by using techniques as service
oriented architecture and web services tech-
nology. There are 250 end-users in the front-
end. They have not only access to geospatial
data based on several thematic layers (such
as property, cadastral and user rights) but
also to the corresponding administrative
data, like contracts and projects.
An end-user can initiate an alteration in user
rights and properties by using a redline
function. These redline marks are automati-
cally sent to the back-end by an automated
workflow process.
Alteration Request
The creation and maintenance of geospatial
(for example cadastral) and thematic layers
takes place in the back-end with a Bentley
desktop GIS system and automated tools. An
example of a modification is an alteration
request or redline mark from an (SAP) end-
user. The data and application maintenance
is done by 15 trained users and 1 administra-
tor. All geospatial data, created, modified,
imported and converted in the back-end, is
stored, managed, indexed and retrieved on
Bentleys Geospatial Server in the mid-end,
including the 2.5 million parcels and related
legal documents.
Web services and web-mapping technology
combined with the service oriented architec-
ture technique integrate geospatial data in
SAP. This solution leads to a high perfor-
mance of approximately 1-2 seconds during
retrieving geospatial data or the use of GIS
functions in SAP (like zooming in/out, and
using thematic layers). Figure 2 illustrates
the architecture of the GIS solution.
The geospatial data is stored centrally and
maintained locally i.e. processing the modifi-
cations and digitalizing the user-rights. This
means, that the thematic layers (like cadas-
tral, cartographic base maps in different
scales, user rights) are managed and indexed
at a centrally located data and application
server. The end-user uses one SAP interface
for descriptive and geospatial data. With the
solution, the State Property Service is capa-
ble of displaying all the business state prop-
erties, managing the real estate contracts
and projects and delivering geographic infor-
mation for (management) decision making
using one single screen.
After Project Delivery
The guidelines for the selection of the GIS
solution were based on the standard project
conditions of the Service as well as the need
of the users. The project group consisted of
a small delegation of users. In this way the
ing the governmental strategic real estate
plans as well as integration with other (geo-
graphic) information systems is one of the
future steps. This can lead to one integrated
governmental (geographic) information sys-
tem. Apart from that, generating new man-
agerial information by combining geospatial
information with the GIS functionality is also
on top of the requirements list.
Other Organisations
For organisations dealing with real estate
issues, geospatial data is an essential infor-
mation component. Next to geospatial data,
administrative data of real estate objects and
contracts are collected and registered. The
key issue is an optimal integration of these
two data sources in one workflow. GIS inte-
gration into SAP is an answer to this need.
Data integration is a new and future proof
solution that fits completely in ICT develop-
ments such as service oriented architecture
and web-services. As proven at the Dutch
Ministry of Finance, integration of GIS and
SAP based on standard GIS components and
SOA leads to a user friendly, geospatially
enabled information system that handles the
very complex tasks and massive data
requirements needed for excellent real estate
management. In this way, GIS-SAP integra-
tion is also very suitable for other (real
estate) organisations.
Sebastiaan Sintemaartensdijk
(s.sintemaartensdijk@minfin.nl) is a senior Business
Consultant at the Dutch Ministry of Finance.
Matty Lakerveld (Matty.Lakerveld@Bentley.com) is
director Geospatial Center of Excellence, Bentley
Systems International. For more information go to
http://domeinen.minfin.nl or visit www.bentley.com.
project tried to optimize the user-friendliness
of the system. User-friendliness means opti-
mal fitting and supporting of the primary
activities by the GIS functions. In the project
the users were responsible for the blueprint
of the GIS functions. The realization of the
SAP-GIS integration meant the first step in
the development of geospatial data and is
related to contract management of the user
rights and selling surplus real estate. The
next step is developing managerial geospa-
tial data and combining geographic informa-
tion to new information.
These steps fit the user-needs. After project
delivery users are able to submit requests
for changes to the information system. For
this a functional management group is orga-
nized in which users with knowledge and
experience of the information system and
business processes participate. These key-
users are supporting users in the usage of
the system (like training, instructions),
addressing incidents and issues and request-
ing for changes. This allows the users to
have a great influence on the evolution of
the information system and also contribute
to an even better acceptance of the informa-
tion system.
Future Developments
Several Services inside the national Dutch
government are dealing with real estate. GIS
applications from ESRI, AutoCAD and Bentley
are being used for this purpose. With
Bentleys integration solution, based on ser-
vice oriented architecture and standard for-
mats, the State Property Service is able to
exchange geospatial data and even integrate
the GIS-SAP solution with other information
systems. Information exchange and combin-
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
15
Ar t i cl e
Figure 3: Example of geospatial information of Aalsmeer displayed in combination with corresponding SAP data
in one SAP user-interface.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:48 Pagina 15
Airborne Laser Scanning
New Systems & Services Shown at INTERGEO 2006
Attempting to review all the products and services being offered on the stands of over 500 companies and organisations at the
INTERGEO 2006 trade fair would require a squad of reviewers and occupy a whole issue of this magazine. Thus, when asked by the
publishers to contribute a review based on my visit to INTERGEO, it seemed best instead to concentrate on a single well-defined
area where a lot of activity was taking place at the fair. The most obvious area for someone with my interests was airborne laser
scanning. Here quite a number of interesting new products and technical developments were to be seen, together with the provision
of a growing number of related services. So I have tried to review this particular area under two main headings - (i) system
suppliers; and (ii) service providers.
By Gordon Petrie
I - System Suppliers
(a) Optech
In terms of the overall installed base of
airborne laser scanners, when viewed on a
world-wide basis, currently the Optech
company from Canada is the leading supplier
in this field. Starting with its initial 1020 model
from the early 1990s, Optech has steadily
developed its ALTM (Airborne Laser Terrain
Mapper) range of laser scanners via its ALTM
2000 series through to its current ALTM 3100
series that was first introduced in January
2004. In January 2006, it added its ALTM
3100EA (Enhanced Accuracy) model with a
claimed accuracy of 5cm in elevation from
a flying height of 500m under optimum condi-
tions. This particular model has sold well with
sales to New Zealand Aerial Mapping (NZAM);
Airborne 1 and the Carnegie Institution in the
U.S.A.; TerraPoint in Canada; and Blom in
Europe over the last few months. At INTERGEO
2006, Optech announced the latest model in
its range, called the ALTM Gemini. This main-
tains the accuracy and performance of the
ALTM 3100EA, but now offers its peak 100kHz
pulse repetition rate at a much higher flying
height - up to 2km - than before. In turn, this
will allow a higher rate of area coverage of the
terrain.
Optech has also offered medium-format digital
cameras as an option that can be integrated
with its ALTM laser scanners to generate
imagery that can then be merged with the
lidar elevation data from the scanners. In the
past, Optech has used for this purpose the
DSS cameras from Applanix, which also sup-
plies the DGPS/IMU unit for the ALTM laser
scanners. However, in 2005, Optech also con-
cluded a formal agreement with Rollei for the
development and supply of its digital camera.
Since then, it has supplied a number of these
for use together with its ALTM scanners.
(b) Leica Geosystems
In 2001, Leica Geosystems entered the air-
borne laser field by purchasing the small
Azimuth company based in Massachusetts that
had built a few of its AeroScan laser scanners
prior to this takeover. After this acquisition,
Leica then entered the field on its own
account with the ALS40 scanner, followed by
the upgraded and much more compact ALS50
model in 2003. This has had a considerable
December 2006
16
Revi ew
(a) The Optech ALTM Gemini sys-
tem that was introduced at INTERGEO 2006. At
back left is the case containing the control electronics; at back right is the
scanning laser unit; at the front are the monitoring and operator control
screens. (Source: Optech))
(b) - Diagram showing the operational concept of the Optech ALTM airborne
laser scanners, including the use of GPS in the aircraft and at the ground base
station. Note the zig-zag pattern of the points being measured on the ground.
(Source: Florida International University)
[a]
[b]
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:49 Pagina 16
sale, especially in North America, where ALS40
& 50 scanners are in use with several of the
larger commercial mapping companies, inclu-
ding EarthData, Horizons Inc., Kucera, LandAir,
Merrick, North West Group and Woolpert, as
well as a number of smaller companies.
The ALS50 has now been replaced by the new
ALS50-II model that was introduced at the
ASPRS Annual Conference held in Reno in May
2006. Production of the ALS50-II is now being
undertaken in Leica Geosystems main manu-
facturing plant in Heerbrugg, Switzerland
instead of Massachusetts. The new ALS50-II
model was again on show in Munich, com-
plete with a smaller and lighter weight
electronics unit and the new IPAS (Inertial
Position & Attitude System) DGPS/IMU system.
The IPAS system is also being employed in the
second-generation ADS40 airborne pushbroom
scanner that was also introduced at the
INTERGEO 2006 fair. Some more details also
emerged at INTERGEO 2006 regarding the
high-performance European inertial units from
iMAR (labelled NUS4) and Sagem (NUS5).
These can, if required, act as the IMU com
ponent of the IPAS10 unit in place of the
American-made inertial units sourced from
Litton (DUS5) and Honeywell (CUS6). This
overcomes the restrictions placed by the U.S.
the ALS50-II to even higher rates. This will
allow users of its airborne laser scanners to
cover a significantly wider swath over the
ground at the same densities as now or they
can acquire greater densities of points within
the present swath widths.
Like Optech, Leica Geosystems has supplied
quite a number of medium-format digital
frame cameras that have been integrated with
its ALS laser scanners. They can be used to
generate digital imagery that can be merged
with the elevation data generated by these
laser scanners. These cameras have been
supplied by Applanix (DSS), Spectrum
(NexVue) and Rollei (AIC). Apparently only a
few of Leica's customers use its large-format
ADS40 digital imager in conjunction with the
ALS laser scanners. Indeed for many applica-
tions, such a combination could be regarded
as overkill both in technical and financial
terms. However, if a substantial proportion of
the ALS scanners are being operated together
with much less expensive medium-format
digital frame cameras, then one could imagine
that Leica might decide to keep the business
in-house and
government with regard to the supply of these
American units to certain countries. In parti-
cular, the use of the European manufactured
IMUs has allowed Leica to offer its airborne
scanners to Chinese agencies.
Another very interesting and potentially very
important announcement from Leica
Geosystems at INTERGEO was that of its new
"Multiple Pulses in Air" (MPiA) technology.
This gives the capability for a laser rangefinder
to fire off a new pulse without waiting for the
reflection from the previous pulse being
received at the rangefinder. Thus more than
one measurement cycle can be taking place at
any moment of time. The technology can be
applied to both airborne and ground-based
laser scanners. As a first
step, Leica expects to
offer its airborne lidar
customers an upgrade
path from the 150 kHz
data acquisition rate of
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
17
Revi ew
(a) - The new Leica Geosystems ALS50-II airborne lidar
showing (1) the laser scanning unit; (2) the laptop
control unit with its touch screen; and (3) the control
electronics box. (Source: Leica Geosystems)
(b) - Diagram showing the concept of "Multiple Pulses
in Air" (MPiA) that was introduced by Leica
Geosystems at INTERGEO 2006. The technology will
allow the next measurement cycle to begin before the
ground reflections from the previous cycle have been
received by the scanner. (Drawn by Mike Shand)
(a) Diagram showing the basic features of the Riegl laser scanning engine that
is being used by several system suppliers. (1) is the laser rangefinder (LRF); (2)
shows the angular coverage of the unidirectional scan of the laser beam; (3) is
the rotating four-faced reflective polygon having an adjustable rotation
speed; and (4) is the Ethernet LAN connection between the control
computer and the laser rangefinder. (Source: Riegl)
(b) IGI's LiteMapper 2400 system. Sitting on an anti-vibration
mount occupying the right side of this picture are the (white)
Riegl laser scanning engine and the (brown) AEROcontrol
GPS/IMU unit. On the left are the AEROcontrol computer and
data storage units and the monitor and TFT touch screens.
(Source: IGI)
[a]
[b]
[a]
[b]
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:49 Pagina 17
Revi ew
build its own medium-format digital frame
cameras. Certainly it has the technical and
manufacturing capabilities to do so.
(c) Riegl
Riegl from Austria has taken a totally different
approach to the business of building and
selling airborne laser scanners to that of the
two market leaders discussed above. Instead
it sells its LMS-Q240i and LMS-Q560 laser
scanner engines comprising a laser rangefinder
and a rotating polygon scanning unit to
several different German system suppliers.
They then add their own control electronics
and DGPS/IMU units to make up a complete
system that they can then offer to their
customers. Three of these Riegl-based airborne
laser scanner systems were shown or
presented at INTERGEO:-
(i) IGI is supplying its LiteMapper 2400 and
5600 systems using the Riegl Q240 and Q560
laser scanning engines integrated with its own
AEROcontrol DGPS/IMU unit. The LiteMapper
system can also be supplied together with
IGI's own DigiCAM digital camera based on the
Hasselblad medium-format digital camera.
Already six of these LiteMapper systems have
been sold.
(ii) TopoSys is offering its Harrier 24 and 56
systems using the same two Riegl laser scan-
ning engines as IGI, but in this case,
integrated with Applanix POS-AV DGPS/IMU
units. The Applanix DSS medium-format digital
camera can also be supplied and integrated
together with a Harrier system. Earlier this
year, TopoSys announced the sale of a Harrier
56 system to a customer in Chile.
(iii) iMAR gave details of the iAIRSURV-LS1000
system that it has built for the Bewag
Geoservice company (its Bewag parent being
an Austrian power and energy supply group).
This system also utilizes a Riegl scanner
engine in conjunction with a DGPS/IMU unit of
iMAR's own manufacture. This system also
offers the possibility of a medium-format
digital camera being integrated into the
system - in this case from Rollei.
In addition to the supply of laser scanning
engines to these three system suppliers, we
also saw at INTERGEO 2006 that Riegl has
built a complete airborne laser scanning
system called the LMS-S560. This utilizes three
of its LMS-Q560 laser scanning engines
together with an IGI AEROcontrol DGPS/IMU
system and a digital camera. This complete
system has been mounted in a pod that has
been fitted to the underside of an aircraft of
the newly-formed Diamond Airborne Sensing
company. It will be interesting to see how
Riegl manages its relations with all these
different competing system suppliers to whom
it is supplying laser scanning engines, while
still building and supplying a complete system
on its own account.
(d) TopoSys (Falcon)
It is also worth recording that TopoSys
showed an incomplete example of its Falcon
III (first announced at INTERGEO 2005) on its
stand at the exhibition. The previous Falcon
I and II models with their distinctive fibre-
optic laser scanner technology have been
very well known in the past: indeed the
Falcon I dates from around 1995. However
only one or two of these earlier models have
been sold over a ten year period. Thus the
Falcon I and II have mainly been used by
TopoSys to provide extensive airborne laser
scanning services in partnership with a
substantial number of commercial mapping
companies all over Europe. The Falcon III will
feature a higher data collection rate than the
previous models.
(e) TopEye
The TopEye airborne laser scanner was another
early system from the mid-1990s. Originally it
was developed by a consortium of Swedish
companies, principally Saab Combitech and
Osterman Helicopters under the title of Saab
Survey Systems. In 1999, Osterman purchased
all the shares of Saab and changed the name
The TopoSys Harrier 56 system (on the left) also uses a Riegl laser scanning engine. On the right is the control
electronics unit for the Applanix DSS camera that is also offered optionally as part of the system.
(Source: Applanix)
(a) The overall concept of the latest TopEye Mk. II system showing its elliptical
(Palmer) scan of the ground and its use of GPS both in the air (in conjunction with
an INS) and at the ground reference station. (Source: TopEye AB)
(b) The ground coverage of the TopEye Mk. II system using progressive Palmer scans.
(Drawn by Mike Shand)
[a] [b]
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
19
Prod_GEO_8_2006 28-11-2006 13:23 Pagina 19
of the company to TopEye AB. In June 2005,
Blom bought the TopEye AB company. At
INTERGEO 2006, TopEye AB shared a stand
with one of its partners, the German company,
Nebel & Partner, which uses TopEye AB to
provide its airborne laser scanning services,
mainly for surveys of transmission lines and
other corridor-type applications. I was
informed that all of the original TopEye Mk.
I scanners have been upgraded recently by the
Swedish AHAB company that was set up by
three former Saab employees. The resulting
TopEye Mk. II systems have new lasers, scan-
ning optics and electronics. They also feature
their distinctive elliptical (Palmer) scanning of
the ground so that all ground objects are
illuminated from two sides. Digital cameras
from Rollei and Hasselblad have been used in
combination with the TopEye scanners.
Currently six of these second generation
TopEye Mk. II systems are being operated
in-house by the Blom group, while the other
two are operated by the Aerotec company in
surveys on behalf of the Indonesian Navy in
the shallow waters around Indonesia's island
archipelago.
Conclusion
It can be seen that a significant number of
important technical developments from the
suppliers of airborne laser scanners were intro-
duced or announced at the INTERGEO 2006
trade fair. In particular, the announcement of
the new MPiA technology by Leica Geosystems
could be very important in the future develop-
ment of laser scanners. It is interesting to note
also the quite different approaches being
taken by system suppliers regarding the actual
mechanisms being used to scan the ground.
Thus the two market leaders, Optech and
Leica, both use oscillating mirrors resulting in
a zig-zag scanning pattern over the ground;
those systems using the Riegl scanning engine
employing a continuously rotating polygon
give rise to a pattern of parallel scan lines; the
TopEye Mk. II scanners are now using nutating
mirrors to generate an elliptical Palmer scan
pattern; while TopoSys has its unique fibre
optic technology to generate a parallel set of
line scans.
II - Service Providers
Turning next to the providers of airborne laser
scanning services with stands at INTERGEO
2006, not unexpectedly, the vast majority of
these were from Germany and Austria.
However there were one or two notable
exceptions - for example, the Russian
Geokosmos company and Helica from Italy.
(a) Geokosmos
Currently this large company, with 250 emplo-
yees, operates five ALTM 2050 and 3100 series
airborne laser scanners. These are supplement-
ed by Kodak DCS 760 and SLR Pro 14n digital
cameras and by Rollei medium-format digital
cameras. Recently the company has put a
Vexcel UltraCam D large-format digital frame
camera into service. Geokosmos has carried
the United States. All of these TopEye Mk. II
scanners are being operated at lower altitudes
(up to 800m) from helicopters, with the Blom
Group using Optech ALTM scanners mounted
on fixed-wing aircraft operating at higher
altitudes for large-area coverage.
On the back of all this recent development
carried out for TopEye AB, AHAB (Airborne
Hydrography AB) is now offering its very
similar TS 3.5 airborne laser scanner to other
customers for surveys being carried out over
land. AHAB has also completed the HawkEye II
airborne laser scanner that is being used for
bathymetric surveys of areas of shallow water
by Admiralty Coastal Surveys - which is a joint
venture between the UK Hydrographic Office
(UKHO), TopEye AB and AHAB. The two
HawkEye Mk. I scanners developed originally
by Saab and dating from the mid-1990s have
been operated extensively (i) by the Swedish
Maritime Administration, and (ii) by the Blom
Nusantara company to carry out bathymetric
A helicopter is being used by the Hansa Luftbild mapping company to acquire terrain elevation data utilizing an
IGI LiteMapper 5600 airborne laser scanning system mounted externally in a Helipod box. (Source: IGI)
December 2006
20
Revi ew
(b) The corresponding image of the same area formed by merging the elevation data
of the DSM with the image data collected (in colour) simultaneously by a Rollei
medium-format airborne digital camera. (Source: Geokosmos)
(a) Digital Surface Model (DSM) of part of the town of Novyi Urengoi located in the
Tyumen region of Western Siberia. This DSM has been derived from airborne laser
scanning carried out by the Geokosmos company for the Gazprom organization
during its mapping of the large area of gas fields located in this region.
[a]
[b]
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:49 Pagina 20
out numerous airborne lidar surveys to create
DTMs and DSMs of linear transportation infras-
tructure features such as roads, railways,
canals, etc. It has also carried out flood plain
mapping and the generation of 3D city models
for telecommunication planning from airborne
lidar data. In combination with aerial photog-
raphy, it also produces ortho-rectified mosaics
and maps. Furthermore, the company has also
carried out numerous surveys of electric power
lines and the associated power distribution
infrastructure. While most of these operations
have been carried out in Russia and the CIS
states, Geokosmos is steadily extending its
operations into the rest of Europe. To this end,
its Geokosmos International arm has opened
offices in Germany and the U.K. and has set
up a joint venture company called G2B in
partnership with the Groupe FIT company
located in Nantes in France.
(b) Helica
This company is based in Amaro in north-east
Italy close to the country's borders with Austria
and Slovenia. It specializes in airborne laser
scanning using a helicopter-mounted Optech
ALTM 3100 system operated in conjunction
with a RolleiMetric digital camera. Helica works
in close collaboration with the Italian National
Institute of Oceanography & Applied
seen that this type of partnering is typical of
this sector of the mapping industry and helps
to offset the very large investment needed to
purchase even a single airborne laser scanning
system and to keep it fully employed.
(d) TopoSys
As noted above, the TopoSys company has
used its home-built Falcon I & II scanners
extensively for the provision of airborne lidar
data. Of its German partners, the Geoplana air
survey and mapping company also had a
stand in the INTERGEO 2006 exhibition.
This company possesses a Cessna 340 aircraft
which is usually fitted with Zeiss RMK
photogrammetric film cameras. However
whenever the company receives contracts for
the provision of lidar data, it replaces these
cameras with one of the Falcon airborne lidar
systems hired in from TopoSys. According to
the TopoSys Web site, besides its network of
German partners, the company appears to
have similar relationships with the Aerodata,
Eurosense and Sodiplan mapping companies
based in Belgium and with the TTI company in
France.
(e) Astec
Just prior to the INTERGEO 2006 fair, the
Terra Digital company has been re-organised
and re-branded as Astec. The company has
been well known for some time as an
operator of both of Leica's airborne digital
sensor products - the ALS50 laser scanner
and the ADS40 pushbroom scanner. In
practice, the company has carried out pro-
jects all over Europe; only 20 to 30 % have
been undertaken within Germany. Many of
these projects have been collaborations with
partner companies from other countries who
do not own an airborne laser scanning
system. They provide knowledge of the
particular national market within which the
contract is being undertaken, with part of
the technical work being shared with the
national partner. In a number of these
contracts involving wide-area mapping, the
ADS40 and ALS50 have been operated
Geophysics (OGS) which is located close by
in Trieste and undertakes much of the post-
processing of the airborne lidar data and the
production of DTMs and digital orthophotos.
With this particular combination of expertise,
much of the airborne laser scanning has
involved coastal and flood plain monitoring
and the mapping of hydro-geological hazards
such as landslides. Interestingly, the partner-
ship has also carried out a trial survey of the
Marano Lagoon lying between Trieste and
Venice in north-east Italy in collaboration with
Optech using the latter's SHOALS airborne
bathymetric laser scanner.
(c) Hansa Luftbild & TopScan
Hansa Luftbild is one of the oldest and largest
German air survey and mapping companies
and operates on a world-wide scale. For its
airborne laser survey operations, it possesses
an IGI LiteMapper system that is used
especially for corridor mapping. However it has
also carried out many projects in partnership
with the TopScan company which specializes
in airborne lidar. The latter company acquired
one of the very first Optech 1020 scanners in
1993. Indeed this particular device, called "Big
Blue", was being displayed on TopScan's
stand at INTERGEO 2006. Since then, TopScan
has acquired three additional scanners from
Optech. These were ALTM 1225,
2050 and 3100 models that
were purchased in 2000, 2003
and 2005 respectively. Each is
equipped with a Rollei digital
camera. The projects carried out
jointly by the two companies
include the same type of appli-
cations carried out by
Geokosmos, but they also
include the surveys of open-cast
coal mines in the Ruhr and
elsewhere. TopScan has also
partnered with TerraImaging
which has its head office in
Amsterdam and branch offices
in Berlin, Germany and
Hautmont in France. It will be
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
21
Revi ew
(a) Dual operation of a Leica
ALS50 laser scanner (in the
foreground at bottom right)
and an ADS40 large-format
pushbroom line scanner by
Terra Digital (now Astec).
(b) A 3D perspective view of
part of the centre of the city
of Frankfurt that has been
constructed from airborne
lidar elevation data acquired
by an ALS50 laser scanner.
(Source: Astec)
[a]
[b]
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:49 Pagina 21
together in tandem. The resulting lidar
elevation data is used first to create a DTM,
which is sold as a separate product. The
data is then used again in combination with
the ADS40 linescan image data to generate
digital orthophotos. For corridor mapping, a
Rollei AIC medium-format digital frame cam-
era is used in conjunction with the ALS50
laser scanner. The projects undertaken by
Astec cover a wide and varied field, includ-
ing 3D city modelling; surveys of open-cast
pits; coastal monitoring and corridor
mapping.
(f ) Diamond
Diamond Aircraft Industries is a manufacturer
of light aircraft with factories in Wiener
Neustadt, Austria and London, Ontario,
Canada. At INTERGEO 2006, the company
entered the remote sensing market through
its formal introduction of its Diamond DA42
MPP (Multi Purpose Platform). This is a
heavily modified version of its DA42 twin-
engined carbon-fibre aircraft designed
specifically for use in airborne imaging. This
is achieved through the addition of a range
of pods that can be fitted to the aircraft
either in its nose or under the main fuselage
of the aircraft. So far, three specific pods
have been developed - (i) an underslung
belly pod that houses the Riegl LMS-S560
airborne laser scanning system mentioned
above; (ii) a nose-mounted pod that can
accommodate a Vexcel UltraCam large-format
digital frame camera; and (iii) an alternative
nose-mounted gimballed turret from PolyTech
in Sweden that can be fitted with any one of
a range of video or thermal infra-red cam-
eras, including a high-resolution example
from the Russian Ural Optical Mechanical
Plant (UOMZ). These alternative versions of
the Diamond DA42 MPP aircraft were shown
on the stand that it shared with Riegl using
beautifully constructed scale models and a
and -Q140 - in conjunction with IGI's CCNS
and AEROcontrol systems. The systems can be
mounted either in a helicopter or a light plane.
The main emphasis appears to be on DTM
and DSM production for 3D landscape and city
modelling, but surveys of open-cast pits have
also been undertaken.
Conclusion
From the discussion above, it can be seen that
the market for the elevation data produced by
airborne laser scanning is steadily increasing in
size. It could also be seen that the high cost
of ownership of airborne laser scanners has
resulted in many different types of partner-
ships being formed and implemented to
provide the varied services required by the
user community.
Gordon Petrie (g.petrie@geog.gla.ac.uk) is Emeritus
Professor in the Dept. of Geographical & Earth
Sciences of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, U.K.
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
23
Revi ew
A perspective view in
colour of an open-cast pit
derived from digital ele-
vation and image data
captured by a Riegl/IGI
airborne scanner system
operated by Milan Flug
GmbH. (Source: Milan
Flug)
series of eye-catching short films shown on a
large video monitor. Two DA42 aircraft have
been modified to act as demonstrators.
Apparently a further production aircraft has
already been sold to a Chinese operator.
Besides which, Diamond has also entered the
market as an airborne imaging service provider
through the formation of a 100% owned sub-
sidiary called Diamond Airborne Sensing
GmbH. Using the two demonstrator aircraft,
this new company will offer a range of air-
borne sensing services employing the Riegl air-
borne laser scanner and the Vexcel UltraCam
digital
camera mentioned above. If required, the
photogrammetric processing of the resulting
data can be carried out by various Austrian
companies that have been recruited as
partners. The aircraft fitted with the turreted
video camera can be used to provide obser-
vation and surveillance services for police and
homeland security agencies.
(g) Milan Flug
This German company also cooperates
strongly with Riegl utilizing three of the latter
company's laser engines - LMS-Q560, -Q280
(a) This twin-engined Diamond DA42 MPP (Multi Purpose Platform) aircraft has been
equipped with a specially built pod fitted below the aircraft to accommodate the
Riegl LMS-S560 airborne scanning system.
(b) A close-up view of the belly pod containing the Riegl laser scanning system attached
to the DA42 MPP aircraft. (Source: Diamond Airborne Sensing)
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:49 Pagina 23
Integrated Collaboration Within t
Trimble Adheres Narrative to News and Strategy
During Trimble's Dimensions 2006 it isn't all about great technology. To be able to
really collaborate, one must be willing and able to listen to each other. Is that why
there were so many stunning storytellers invited in Las Vegas?
By Remco Takken
The Strip
For many Trimble users the Dimensions 2006
event is the family trip of the year. Stay the
night in the legendary Mirage Hotel (famous
for its appearance in the movie Ocean
Eleven), do a bit of gambling in one of the
many casinos at the Strip, and in the
evening attend a performance of Cirque du
Soleil or a rock show by Aerosmith.
In daytime Las Vegas is pretty cool too, for
the nearly 2,000 Trimble users got to attend
more than 200 sessions and almost thirty
qualified educational workshops, running the
gamut from process integration with
Autodesk or Bentley products to advanced
positioning technology.
Partner's Pavilion
Theme of this year's event is Building Your
Connected Site. One awesome example can
be seen at the partner's pavilion, namely the
software made by XYZ Solutions, acquired by
Trimble in November 2006.
Using interactive 3D software, a contractor
can oversee cranes and other vehicles from
his office in real time. All of the movements
and other ongoings become visible on the
screen. In the meantime the bulldozers, trac-
tors and digging machines make their
changes in the digital terrain model. With a
simple mouse click one can check whether
maintenance is needed or if tyres, wheels,
axes or the motor need revision. With the
capturing of business rules and what-if
scenarios the management of spatial aspects
on the site are coming within reach.
GIS provider ESRI was also present in the
expo hall. While the ESRI extension for
Trimble hardware can be considered a known
commodity within the survey world, during
2006 the ESRI-Leica collaboration and
'Mobile Matrix' got all the attention. This,
says one American ESRI executive in his
exhibition booth in Las Vegas, might change
very quickly with the announcement of the
latest developments between ESRI and
Trimble. Typically, the ESRI guy then quips:
At this point it is just too early to make any
further comments. So we will wait patiently
for things to come.
Recent Developments
The official start of Trimble Dimensions is on
November 6, when Steven W. Berglund,
President and Chief Executive Officer of
Trimble, delivers his keynote speech.
Berglund shows considerate interest in
developments not directly related to survey-
ing or positioning: Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) is more than a possibili-
ty to trace expensive assets. It holds the
implicit promise where every host can serve
as some sort of sensor and at the same time
provide a link to a larger scale network.
Furthermore, we see that in mesh networks
December 2006
24
Conf er ences & Meet i ngs
The highlight of all history-laden lectures during Trimble Dimensions is the
presentation by former New York Times-journalist Dava Sobel
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:49 Pagina 24
much more data becomes available against
lower cost. Concluding with the notion that
the phenomenon of image recognition might
lead to more intelligent data.
In his speech, Berglund goes along the line
of three main points that are going to be
important for Trimble in the foreseeable
future. It's all about GPS, wireless and
mobile communication and the possibility to
manage large data sets.
Concerning developments in GPS, Berglund
points out Trimble's introduction of their VRS
Now Service, at INTERGEO in Munich,
Germany, last autumn. This is an infrastruc-
ture that enables access to RTK/GNSS correc-
tions of the German Sapos (Satellite
Positioning Service of the German State
Survey). Here, it is not necessary to own a
base station.
The wireless revolution speaks for itself:
everybody, be it outside or inside the office,
is always in touch with each another. About
data revolution Berglund says: In the broad-
ly defined realm of Information Technology a
lot of work has to be done when we are
talking field work versus the office. With the
acquisition of Quantm in the first quarter of
2006, Trimble made a move in the right
Change Management consulting practice in
California, Clemmons is quite experienced in
organising things. In that spirit she formed a
team that actually erected some heavy stone
pillars with a little help from the wind, some
rope and linen kite.
In order to illustrate Clemmons amazing trail
of discoveries, a History Channel TV-docu-
mentary is shown. Clemmons displays an
impressive amount of quite plausible theo-
ries about Egyptian symbols. These are no
religious signs, they are just tools. The engi-
neers that thought up the pickaxe, kite and
rope clamp were worshipped as Gods. All
this time, people have been looking at hiero-
glyphs the wrong way.
When remembering the use of the Trimble
S6 Robotic System during reconstructions,
Clemmons says: I am about to write a son-
net in honour of this machine. And I surely
hope that historians will listen to me this
time when I say that every history institute
should have one. But you will always see
that theres no money.
Astronomy and Time
Undoubtedly the highlight of all history-laden
lectures during Trimble Dimensions is the
direction. Quantm software enables routes in
a digital landscape for future railways,
pipelines and canals.
From Panama to Egypt
Remarkably, the virtual canal planner doesnt
get a single mention during one of the more
interesting user stories concerning canal
building at Trimble Dimensions. In the case
of the widening of the Panama Canal in Latin
America the focus is on GPS receivers,
Trimmark Radios and Trimbles RTK GPS
base stations.
The first plans taking shape for a canal con-
necting the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans
stunningly date back to the year 1534, while
in 1914 the official opening festivities take
place. As with twelve other sessions, this
fascinating history is also being told in
Spanish.
Maureen Clemmons keeps in line with the
strong narrative of the Panama Canal pro-
ceedings with her captivating adventures
concerning ancient Egypt. Her theory, that
the obelisks from the Pharaoh era were
erected using giant kites, is not very popular
among Egyptologists. Clemmons herself isnt
much interested in them. As shes running a
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
25
Conf er ences & Meet i ngs
the 'Connected Site'
Using interactive 3D software, a contractor can oversee cranes and other vehicles from his office in real time. All of the movements and other
ongoings become visible on the screen. In the meantime the bulldozers, tractors and digging machines make their changes in the digital terrain
model (software made by XYZ Solutions).
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:49 Pagina 25
presentation by former New York Times-
journalist Dava Sobel. Based on her book
Longitude (translated in two dozen lan-
guages) Sobel perplexes a hall full of survey-
ors and the like with her account of the 18th
century clock maker John Harrison. He is the
one who thought up the time differences on
earth and he was the first person ever who,
with accuracy, could determine east-west
movements at sea.
Sobel explains how the old astronomical
idea of mapping the stars and predicting the
moons cycle was only much later seen in
relation to time. Galileo already understood
the time keeping idea, but isnt it amazing to
see how Harrison had to struggle for his the-
ories and the recognition of what we now
see as the most important time keeper ever
built? And isnt it striking that only in 2006
Harrison got his own plaque at the
Westminster Abbey?
Sobels love for Harrisons four hand made
clocks appears to be broader than these his-
torically astounding relics. She ends her lec-
ture with the notion that with the advent of
GPS we are again looking at the stars above.
I wish I could hear from the board of longi-
tude who made Harrisons life such a strug-
gle, what they would make of Trimbles con-
nected site.
Railroad Track Scanned in 3D
An often-heard prediction is that 3D laser
scanning will get cheaper as time passes,
connects to Arcadis MicroStation-solution
with his lecture concerning the current state
of affairs in 3D laser scanning. Greaves:
Integration with CAD is definitely not a
solved problem. At this moment, only four
big providers are really serious in dealing
with the question of how to place large
point cloud data into a CAD environment.
These are Autodesk, Bentley, Aveva and
Intergraph, and they all choose different
strategies.
Instead of speculating on further price
adjustments in the market, Greaves remarks:
The price of purchase should be last on
everybodys list when you consider buying a
scanner. I would say that precision, dynamic
range, speed, ease of use, supplier support
and stability are much more important. And
also dont forget about eye safety. Its cur-
rently a hornets nest of regulations, where
no supplier knows exactly where we stand at
this point. But it is in the interest of the
user.
Ironically Greaves quips that the huge point
cloud data arent moving too fast over the
Internet. Lets put this problem in the
unsolved category.
An important business issue, according to
Greaves, is the possibility of outsourcing.
Then the investment and the search for get-
ting the right people is no longer your prob-
lem. But do you really want to depend on a
third party? In the world of laser scanning,
theres also the question of how to qualify
them. I am not talking about the knowledge
about laser scanning itself, the point is: do
outsourced workers have any domain exper-
tise in the field they are hired in?
Furthermore, Greaves notices important inno-
vations taking place outside of the survey
world. Robotic vision and innovations in
military are hard to keep an eye on, hard to
follow and hard to predict. But the innova-
tion in this industry is coming from outside.
Just look at Trimble and the connected site.
Theres a lot of talk about imaging and cel-
lular, but Trimble didnt invent the cell
phone. All core technologies come from out-
side their labs.
Conclusion
Trimble Dimensions dealt with the integra-
tion of diffuse elements, and it got over
quite succesfully. Lets see more of this when
data becomes more intelligent, terabytes
have stopped making the tiniest ripple and
workers really act like they are all connected.
Remco Takken (rtakken@geoinformatics.com) is a
contributing editor to GeoInformatics. A virtual
visit to Trimble is possible via www.trimble.com.
and that common use will grow with it.
Mijke Soesbergen is using 3D laser scanning
within Arcadis Group. She says: In the rail-
road industry, demands on safety around
railway tracks are getting higher more strict
by the month. Nowadays, a train-free period
is required in order to be allowed near the
tracks. This usually takes place during the
night, and you can only do so much in a
couple of hours. You can all imagine the
costs this will bring.
A possible alternative, direct-reflex technolo-
gy, doesnt go down very well when dealing
with railroad tracks because of the reflection
of the steel. Moreover, surveying the over-
head wires using direct-reflex technology is
very complicated and time consuming.
Above that Soesbergen lays out another
problem: Most of the time, the rail is not
scanned in its entirety, so its hard to define
the exact top of the rail. Trimble Real Works
Survey has a tool called Easy Profile Tool.
We tried it, but it wasnt applicable for our
problem.
To stay independent from train free periods,
the Trimble GX 3D laser scanner was used,
by not surveying on the track itself. With a
self-made tool called Tracie, a scanned
points cloud could be exported and convert-
ed as a line file into MicroStation.
Laser Scanning
Tom Greaves, senior analyst and managing
partner of research firm Sparpoint LLC, tightly
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
27
Conf er ences & Meet i ngs
President and Chief Executive
Officer Trimble Steven W. Berglund:
It's all about GPS, wireless and
mobile communication and the
possibility to manage large
data sets.
l.jp
jp
sid
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:49 Pagina 27
Data Compression Techniques
Compression Theory Older Than the Computer Era
For as long as we have had computers data compression has been an important issue.
Essentially there are two reasons for data compression: compressed data require less
disk space and communication of compressed data is faster. Already in the early days
of computers file size was an issue, which required an efficient use of limited disk
space. In modern times disk space seems unlimited, but for many types of data the
file size can be huge. Communicating and using these files requires efficient storage
and thus data compression.
By Robin Wevers
History
In 1948 Claude E. Shannon (1916-2001) pre-
sented his paper A Mathematical Theory of
Communication. In this paper he formulated
his theory of data compression. Shannon
established that there is a fundamental limit
to lossless data compression, which is called
the entropy rate. The value of the entropy
rate depends on the nature of the informa-
tion source. It is impossible to compress
data with a compression rate that is higher
than the entropy rate without losing informa-
tion.
Shannon also developed the theory of lossy
data compression. In lossy data compres-
sion, the decompressed data does not have
to be exactly the same as the original data.
The theory about data compression sets fun-
damental limits on the performance of all
data compression algorithms.
Mathematics and Computing
It requires an efficient algorithm to achieve a
high compression ratio. In mathematics and
computing, an algorithm is a set of well-
defined instructions for accomplishing some
task which, given an initial state, will termi-
nate in a defined end-state. The quality of
the algorithm depends on the instructions.
Algorithms that are not defined properly can
lead to incorrect results. An obvious example
of an algorithm is a computer program. A
computer program is a set of instructions in
a specific order, designed for a specific task.
In literature a number of types of algorithms
are mentioned. Most of these algorithms are
intended for problem-solving: a greedy algo-
rithm for example at each stage chooses
what looks best at that moment without
considering all parameters. It progresses in a
fashion making one greedy choice after
another iteratively reducing each given prob-
lem into a smaller one. An example would
be when you are in the mountains and want
to climb the highest mountain: from your
position in the valley you look around for
the highest mountain you can see and start
climbing. Only when you are near the top
you notice a higher mountain that was earli-
er hidden from your view.
A greedy algorithm not always finds the best
solution. This is the main difference with a
dynamic programming algorithm, which is
exhaustive and guaranteed to find the opti-
mum solution. Another well-known algorithm
is the brute force algorithm: a problem-solv-
ing technique, which consists of systemati-
cally enumerating all possible candidates for
the solution and checking whether each can-
didate satisfies the requirements. Brute-force
search is simple to implement, and will
always find a solution if it exists. Many other
types are mentioned in literature.
Examples can be found on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm.
Algorithms for Data Compression
Data compression obviously requires an
algorithm to compress data in such a way
that the data can later be recovered by a
decompression algorithm. This requires a dif-
ferent type of algorithm, for example the
Huffman code, a lossless encoding scheme
developed in 1952 by David Huffman for
compressing text. The Huffman code uses
variable length codes for encoding symbols
(such as text characters). The variable-length
code is based on the estimated probability
of occurrence for each possible value of the
source symbol. In this algorithm the code for
e will be short, whereas the code for q will
be long, thus ensuring a compact encoding
of text.
Run-length encoding (RLE) is another simple
form of data compression in which identical
sequences of data are stored as a single
data value and count, rather than as the
original data. For example a black and white
image where all values are either 0 (black)
or 1 (white) you may have a string that looks
like
1111111111111100000000000000011111111111.
This can be stored more efficiently by:
14W(hite)-15B(lack)-11W(hite). This is most
useful on data that contains many long
December 2006
28
Speci al
Claude Shannon created a foundation for
modern information theory. In 1948
Shannon published his ideas in A
Mathematical Theory of Communication.
Copyrights: Lucent Technologies.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:50 Pagina 28
sequences: for example simple graphic
images such as icons and line drawings.
An interesting mathematical approach to
compression is presented by the wavelet
theory. Wavelets are functions that satisfy
certain mathematical rules and are used in
representing data or other functions. In the
early 1800's Joseph Fourier discovered that
he could superpose sines and cosines to
represent other functions, leading to the
well-known Fourier transforms.
Wavelet algorithms process data at different
scales or resolutions. Wavelets are well-
suited for approximating data with sharp
discontinuities. Wavelet analysis allows you
to choose the best wavelets adapted to
your data and sparsely represent the data.
This sparse coding makes wavelets an
excellent tool in the field of data compres-
sion.
compression, like some graphics, audio and
video. Lossy compression reduces the quality
of the file, but depending on the application,
the loss may be acceptable or even unno-
ticeable.
GeoTIFF
GeoTIFF represents an effort by over 160 dif-
ferent companies and organizations in
remote sensing, GIS, cartographic, and sur-
veying to establish a TIFF based interchange
format for georeferenced raster imagery. TIFF
is the most popular data format in the world
today for the storage, transfer and display of
raster images, such as clipart, logotypes and
scanned documents. Today, TIFF is also
being used for storage of map information.
The TIFF imagery file format can be used to
store and transfer digital satellite imagery,
aerial photos, elevation models, scanned
Lossless and Lossy
The most important characteristic of a data
compression technique is whether the algo-
rithm is lossless or lossy. Lossless compres-
sion is a compression technique that does
not lose any data in the compression pro-
cess. Lossless compression is convenient for
transferring files across the Internet, as
smaller files are transferred faster. Lossless
compression is also useful for storing files
because they take up less space. The advan-
tage of lossless compression clearly is that
the compressed file will decompress to an
exact duplicate of the original file. The disad-
vantage is that the compression ratio is usu-
ally not very high and can theoretically even
result in bigger files.
To get a higher compression ratio requires a
lossy compression. Because of the data loss,
only certain applications are fit for lossy
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
29
Speci al
s and Formats
JPEG-compression is a lossy technique that works well on photographs; as a GIF-file this photograph was 2,93 Mbyte, converted to JPEG is was reduced to 1,10 Mbyte without
any visual loss of quality.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:50 Pagina 29
maps or the results of geographic analyses.
Over the past several years many users of
such images have requested geographic data
suppliers to provide imagery in TIFF format.
TIFF is a public domain format, which is
capable of supporting compression, tiling,
and can be extended to include geographic
metadata. GeoTIFF is the implementation of
the geographic metadata. GeoTIFF concerns
TIFF files that have geographic information
embedded in the TIFF-file.
Using this geographic information the image
can be positioned in the correct location.
GeoTIFF is a metadata format, which pro-
vides both the image data and the associat-
ed geographic information. The TIFF file
structure allows both the metadata and the
image data to be encoded into the same
file.
The GeoTIFF is an open, public domain for-
mat. It is freely available to software compa-
nies; product managers can for each product
decide to include GeoTIFF capabilities. As a
result many systems today can read GeoTIFF
files into the correct geographic position:
many Geographic Information Systems,
Image Processors and Computer Aided
Design applications.
GeoPDF
GeoPDF is a proprietary extension to the
Adobe PDF file format, from TerraGo
Technologies. GeoPDF is a mapping format
that uses the Adobe document standard to
let you share georegistered maps. The geo-
extension adds a coordinate transformation
matrix and other metadata to allow transfor-
mation of PDF coordinates to a projected
Cartesian coordinate system. GeoPDFs often
include other advanced PDF features such as
layers and object data which can add signifi-
cant GIS functionality to the file, particularly
when used with the TerraGo Technologies
plugin to Adobe Reader.
The TerraGo Technologies GeoPDF utilizes a
method for embedding cartographic data
within a PDF. This is based on the ability to
transform coordinates in PDF space to coor-
dinates in the Cartesian coordinate system
which represents a map projection, and from
those coordinates to the latitude and longi-
tude of the spheroid described by a named
datum and projection. The reverse transfor-
mations are also possible. The method for
accomplishing these transformations is gen-
eralized such that a single PDF may support
multiple map frames within a single PDF. The
identification of map frames and the actual
transformations are accomplished by a plug-
in, which reads the data and performs the
required mathematics.
MrSID
MrSID (pronounced Mister Sid) is an acronym
that stands for Multiresolution Seamless
Image Database. MrSID is an image com-
pressor, viewer, and file format for extremely
large raster graphics images. MrSID, created
by LizardTech, works by putting together
hundreds of small image tiles into one large
seamless image that can be compressed and
decompressed with little or no degradation.
A problem that was common with large
raster images was the long amount of time it
December 2006
30
Speci al
It is impossible to compress
data with a compression
rate that is higher than
the entropy rate without
losing information.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 09:22 Pagina 30
took to open these files. The creators of
MrSID overcame that problem by giving the
user the ability to decompress just the por-
tion of the image they wanted to view. The
user can move from one part of the image
to another quickly without having to wait for
the entire image to decompress.
Another problem that is associated with
large raster images was the amount of stor-
age space they require. MrSID uses a patent-
ed wavelet technology first developed at
the National Research Laboratories at Los
Alamos to achieve a compression ratio of
20:1 for greyscale images and 50:1 for full
colour images. A satellite photo from space
that once required the storage space of forty
CD-ROMs, can now be compressed and
stored on one CD-ROM. The wavelet technol-
ogy used by MrSID relies on advanced math-
ematical algorithms both to compress an
image and build the viewer. MrSID technolo-
gy uses lossless wavelet compression to cre-
ate an initial image. Then the encoder
widely used image format on the net, can
only store 8 bits per pixel (256 or fewer
colours).
Full-colour monitors are getting cheaper all
the time and JPEG images look better than
GIFs on such hardware. It seems likely that
GIF will become obsolete over the next cou-
ple of years.
JPEG handles only still images, but there is a
related standard called Motion Pictures
Experts Group (MPEG) for motion pictures.
MPEG was developed for dealing with digital
video; since most video also contains audio,
MP3 was developed as an audio extension
of that work. A standard WAV-file that is con-
verted to a MP3 file will usually be much
smaller, since MP3 employs a lossy, high-
compression algorithm that eliminates much
of the data. MP3-compression uses the fact
that the human ear cannot hear soft sounds
in the presence of loud sounds having a
similar frequency. The compression makes
the resulting file much smaller so that sever-
al dozen MP3 files can fit, for example, on a
single compact disk. The sound quality of
the MP3 file will be slightly lower than the
original WAV-file, but only an experienced ear
will notice the difference.
Conclusion
The question now is of course which com-
pression technique and format to use for
geographic information. Vital for answering
this question is whether or not a loss of
information is acceptable and the importance
of achieving a high compression rate. For
example program files and data that will be
used for detailed analyses allow no loss of
information, whereas files that will be used
solely for publications or presentations this
loss is not important. When a loss of infor-
mation is acceptable JPEG can achieve a
relatively high rate for map information and
can still be adequate for publications.
For many other applications where informa-
tion loss cannot be tolerated GeoTIFF and
MrSID are good options, where MrSID will
usually give the best compression ratio.
Robin Wevers (r.r.wevers@freeler.nl) is a freelance
writer of geo-ict-articles. More information can be
found at www.remotesensing.org/geotiff/geotiff.html
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression and
www.faqs.org/faqs/compression-faq/part2/index.html.
The paper by Claude Shannon can be found at:
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/
shannon1948.pdf.
divides the image into zoom levels, sub-
bands and bitplanes. After the initial encod-
ing, the image creator can apply zero or
more optimizations.
While 2:1 compression ratios may be
achieved losslessly, higher compression rates
are lossy much like JPEG-compressed data.
Since the image remains geometrically
accurate after compression, it can be geo-
referenced before compression or overlaid
with other referencing data. MrSID files are
a binary MIME type, that is well suited to be
sent over the Internet. Only the requested
zoom and area of the image is sent to the
browser. MrSID was developed primarily for
Geographic Information Systems, but is also
used in photography, mapping, document
management, medical imaging, and games.
LizardTech offers a software package called
GeoExpress to read and write MrSID files.
They also provide a free web browser plug-
in. Most major GIS software packages can
read MrSID files including those from ESRI,
Bentley Systems, MapInfo and Autodesk.
Winzip, JPEG, MP3
A well-known compression methodis Winzip.
which is widely used for compressing data
files or program files. Clearly Winzip is a
lossless algorithm; when these files are
decompressed, all bytes must be present to
ensure their integrity. If bytes are missing
from a program, it won't run. If bytes are
missing from a data file, it will be incom-
plete and unreliable.
Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) was
designed for compressing either full-color or
gray-scale images. It works well on pho-
tographs and similar material, but not so
well on lettering or line drawings. JPEG is a
lossy compression. Converting a GIF-file to
JPEG will usually reduce its size, but it will
also reduce the quality to some extent. JPEG
is designed to exploit known limitations of
the human eye, notably the fact that small
colour changes are per-
ceived less accurately than
small changes in brightness.
Thus, JPEG is suitable for
compressing images that
will be looked at by
humans. JPEG is not suit-
able for images that will be
analysed automatically: the
small errors introduced by
JPEG may cause problems,
even if they are invisible to
the eye.
A difference between JPEG
and GIF is that JPEG stores
24 bits per pixel (16 million
colours): GIF, the other
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
31
Speci al
According to the theory about data compression there
are fundamental limits on the maximum compression
rate that can be achieved without loss of information.
An example of a wavelet.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 09:22 Pagina 31
Since the early beginnings of digital imagery people have used various forms of
compression. The primary driver for this was almost always size related because
imagery takes up a lot of space - doubling the resolution of vector data has little
real effect on data sizes, whereas doubling the resolution of imagery increases
storage requirements four fold.
By Simon Cope
Compression Ratios
Spatial imagery usually involves very large
volumes of data. Therefore compression effi-
ciency becomes important both in terms of
compression ratios achievable for a certain
quality result and throughput of the codec.
This is a set of instructions capable of per-
forming encoding and decoding on a digital
data stream or signal. In this case, the codec
are the instructions telling the computer how
to compress or uncompress an image.
Until about a decade ago most compression
codecs used were either LZW, a universal
lossless data compression algorithm, or DCT,
discrete cosine transform, based. LZW com-
pression is used for lossless compression
giving relatively small compression ratios but
retaining 100 per cent of the original quality.
LZW compression is used with TIF images.
DCT, or discrete cosine
transform, style codecs are used by the ven-
erable JPEG format. DCT allows significant file
size compression by removing redundant
pixels from the image. This can dramatically
affect the quality of the image though.
Wavelet Based Formats
The introduction of DWT (Wavelet) based
compression formats was really somewhat of
a revelation as suddenly ratios as high as
35:1 were achievable whilst retaining suffi-
cient quality in the compressed imagery for
the majority of uses. Wavelet based formats
also have another major benefit the
multi-resolution pyramid provides the basis
needed to efficiently extract arbitrary views,
something lacking in common graphics for-
mats such as TIFF and JPEG which were
never designed for large images. The better
wavelet formats, including ECW, also
resolved a number of other limitations such
as supporting files over 4GB in size, and
supporting arbitrary numbers of image
bands.
We at ER Mapper believe the ECW format is
a major factor in the acceptance of highly
compressed imagery. ECW offers good com-
pression ratios, quality and performance, free
compressors, application plug-ins and view-
ers, and we made Software Development
Kitss available free to other companies very
early on under very liberal licensing terms.
This licensing regime meant that other appli-
cation developers could put ECW support
into their application without charge. In
many countries over 90 per cent of all aerial
imagery sold today is shipped in ECW for-
mat. Other vendors tried to build business
models around selling basic compression
and decompression and that was never
going to work because you are exposed
to someone giving the stuff away,
which is exactly what we did.
ISO JPEG 2000
Late in 2000 the ISO
JPEG 2000 format was
finally ratified. JPEG
2000 provides a plethora
of features intended to enable the
format into be used in almost any conceiv-
able imagery application from digital cam-
eras to spatial imagery and medical. It took
about four years to really gain any momen-
tum due to factors such as incompatibilities
between various JPEG 2000 implementations,
lack of market demand, lackluster perfor-
mance from many implementations, and lack
of metadata standards for specific markets.
The needs for spatial imagery are significant-
ly more demanding than most applications
of JPEG 2000, yet unfortunately many of the
implementations available are shoehorned
into spatial software with little regard for
addressing their many shortcomings. Most
have problems dealing with the image sizes
we typically deal with on a daily basis. We
actually do a fair bit of business selling our
JPEG 2000 SDK to other spatial software
vendors to replace their existing solution
because a lot of them benchmark well on a
50MB file but are completely useless with
December 2006
32
Speci al
Figure 1: Single untiled wavelet pyramid.
Image Compression - Past, Pre
What will be the Role of Hard Disk Recording Technolo
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:50 Pagina 32
2TB files, despite everyone claiming compli-
ance with the specifications. The compliance
test is actually easy to pass, and passing it
doesnt mean your software will actually
work on real data.
Quantity Over Quality?
Compatibility problems are exasperated by
the complexity of the format, and vendors
simply providing users with too many of the
available JPEG 2000 options. There are many
possible encoding parameters available and
many combinations of them produce images
that are not very suitable for a lot of uses.
Unfortunately many software vendors seem
to believe in quantity over quality when it
comes to providing options to their end
users.
As a simple example, JPEG 2000 files can
consist of one or more tiles. A tile can be
quite small up to extremely large 2^32
pixels in each dimension. Some of the poorly
written JPEG 2000 implementations actually
require the use of tiles as they are memory
bound and have to hold the entire tile in
memory to perform the wavelet transform (it
is actually possible to perform the DWT
transform using as little as approximately
18*Width bytes of memory).
Untiled and Tiled
Although tiling the image may sound like a
reasonable process, in fact it imposes severe
limitations on the use of the file. Consider
the two diagrams, see figures 1 and 2, which
represent the wavelet pyramid for an untiled
and tiled wavelet compressed image.
In the untiled case a number of operations
are quite efficient. Extracting a low-resolution
thumbnail for instance is usually a single
data read from the file. In the tiled case the
Disk seek rates are measured as the average
seek time from the center track to each edge
and might measure 5ms for a SCSI disk and
12ms for SATA drives, but track-to-track seek
times may be as low as 0.2ms, so placing
the data closer together effectively improves
the seek time of the drive because it reduces
the average track seek span.
The actual processing resources required to
compress and decompress the imagery will
become irrelevant in the future. The sheer
computing power available in the near term
will effectively render Central Processing Unit
(CPU) a free resource. Trading CPU against IO
costs will remain a winning proposition for
the foreseeable future.
The future need for compression will also be
driven by the rapid uptake of digital aerial
cameras, some of which can produce several
TB of data per day. Effective exploitation of
this type of data may require producing sev-
eral mosaics of a given area of interest using
different parts of each frame, each frame
having very high overlap. Use of this imagery
requires very efficient delivery to the end
user and thus compression is an additional
benefit when either copying or streaming
imagery around networks.
Future Compression Algorithms
It will be interesting to see what future com-
pression algorithms are like. Although
wavelet compression seems relatively recent,
wavelets as a mathematical method actually
date back over 100 years. All we are really
seeing now is more functionality around
existing compression concepts, JPEG 2000
really doesnt compress any better than pre-
vious proprietary formats but certainly has a
lot of other useful features. When you
research something like hard disk recording
technologies and the strategies they employ
to encode the data on the magnetic platters
you begin to realize we are probably only
scratching the surface of what might be pos-
sible in the future.
Simon Cope (Simon.cope@ermapper.com) is a
Chief Software Architect with ER Mapper,
www.ermapper.com.
lowest resolution level from each pyramid
must be read and then reassembled into the
thumbnail considerably more work. Similar
problems exist extracting arbitrary views as
they typically intersect more than one pyra-
mid and this adds considerable Input/Output
burden on the computer as the data for each
tile is generally spread throughout the file.
The real use for tiling JPEG 2000 files is to
enable efficient chipping of the file, for
example by placing the tile boundaries at
map sheet boundaries an arbitrary stan-
dalone image can be relatively easily extract-
ed. In practice this will represent an extreme-
ly small percentage of overall usage.
There are several other features of JPEG
2000 that have similar pitfalls for unwary
users, and this is the reason we provide so
few encoding options in ER Mappers soft-
ware. We actually produce JPEG 2000 files as
similar in structure as possible to ECW as
this has been found to work best for most
spatial imagery applications. Extra options
would simply cause more problems than
they solve.
Cost of Disk Storage
In the future compression will most likely
become even more important, despite the
rapidly dropping price of disk storage. The
reason for this is that the IOps cost of disk
is not changing, and in fact is almost con-
stant irrespective of drive technology and
capacity at around $2 per IO per second. So
10TB of disk may only cost $5000 using
500GB SATA drives but providing enough
IOps to serve that data to 10,000 concurrent
users requires a lot more than 20 disks.
Higher compression ratios help relieve IO
pressure because the data is closer together
on disk resulting in more IOps all else equal.
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
33
Speci al
Figure 2: Multiple small tile wavelet pyramids.
e sent and Future
gies?
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:50 Pagina 33
Big Performance Challenges Can' t
Interview with Idevio and LizardTech
In this interview Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Patric Nordstrom, Idevio, and Jon
Skiffington, Product Manager Geospatial Imaging with Lizardtech, explain some of the
essentials of raster and vector data compression. This is all done in words as plain as
possible in order to bring the terms of compression closer and thus encourage to
increase its usage in peoples daily geospatial routine.
By Joc Triglav
Please introduce shortly your companys
compression product(s) and their basic
characteristics, including free
viewers and/or plug-ins for using your
compressed data.
Idevio: Idevio provides a suite of products
for geographic vector data. All products are
based on RaveGeo, a compressed, streaming
multi-resolution format with supporting soft-
ware. RaveGeo typically compresses databas-
es 10-20 times compared to common vector
formats. Our multi-resolution feature makes
the data available in a number of resolutions
and extends the useful scale range to a fac-
tor of about 1000. Streaming means that
data is sent incrementally, similar to how
video streaming works. In addition RaveGeo
dramatically increases performance. Both
local and network data access times
becomes significantly shorter.
RaveGeo is a loss-less compression method
and preserves the topology of the original
data. The format provides seamless access
of data and is capable of handling very large
databases (+100 GB).
Idevio provides development kits for embed-
ding RaveGeo into custom applications and
also plugins for GIS vendors such as ESRI,
Mapinfo, Luciad and Carmenta. Moreover,
Idevio offers add-on modules for map visual-
ization, routing and geocoding.
RaveGeo runs on many platforms from work-
stations to handhelds and mobile phones
including operating environments such as
Java (J2ME, J2SE), Microsoft (.NET, XP, 2000,
NT, CE, Mobile) and Symbian. The interfaces
are available in Java, C++ and C#.
Lizardtech: GeoExpress preserves pixel-for-
pixel image fidelity through 2:1 lossless and
20:1 visually lossless compression to either
MrSID or ISO standard JPEG 2000 format.
Massive geospatial imagery is more manage-
able and network friendly, making it possible
to distribute enormous image files on any
platform, over any connection speed in a
lossless format. GeoExpress also provides
valuable image manipulation tools such as
reprojection, color balancing and area of
interest encoding.
Express Server enables instant online view-
ing of massive geospatial imagery over any
device by optimizing output from existing
hardware. Express Server ensures interoper-
ability through features such as support for
JPEG 2000 and OpenGIS WMS publishing
and the ArcIMS integration toolkit.
Spatial Express helps organizations maximize
return on their investment in Oracle
Database by enabling storage of MrSID and
JPEG 2000 images natively in Oracle Spatial
10g. Spatial Express reduces storage space
requirements for raster images by as much
as 95 percent, enabling organizations to
lower costs and keep all raster, vector and
business information in a common Oracle
Database. Additionally, Spatial Express uses
the Oracle GeoRaster interface. This allows
MrSID and JPEG 2000 images to be viewed
in any GeoRaster-enabled application, reduc-
ing training, deployment and support costs.
For non-GeoRaster-enabled applications,
LizardTechs ArcMap Plug-in for Spatial
Express is available that enable users to
import raster data as image layers into their
maps and other geospatial projects.
Would you say that your compression
product is easy to use? Which and how
much of previous knowledge does it
require for a successful usage? Is its use
more intended for wide masses or for
geospatial specialists?
December 2006
36
Speci al
Idevio: Multi-resolution vector data.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:50 Pagina 36
Idevio: Reading from data sources in
RaveGeo format is very easy; in most cases
the end user doesn't notice anything other
than increased performance and wider
usable scale range when accessing a
database in RaveGeo format.
The compressing software, the RaveGeo
Visual Compiler, is an advanced tool that
allows the user to completely control the
generalization and compression process.
There is also a RaveGeo Compiler Lite which
simplifies the settings needed so that input
data can be converted by more or less using
drag and drop. In addition Idevio offers sup-
port and training on the Visual Compiler and
also sells ready to use map data, like
TeleAtlas Multinet, for the wide masses.
Lizardtech: While GeoExpress is intended for
use in the geospatial market, one of its great
advantages is that using GeoExpress doesnt
require the user to be an expert photogram-
metrist. Easy workflows and pre-defined pro-
files mean that most users can become
familiar with GeoExpress basic functionality
in an hour or two, and become proficient
within a week.
How is your product using spatial
database and web server technology for
distribution of massive geospatial image
datasets via the Internet? Can your prod-
uct easily be used with any
of the widely used GIS/geospatial
software?
Idevio: RaveGeo is well adopted for Internet
usage. With RaveGeo the vector data is
streamed using http and the data is ren-
dered in web browsers with Java.
Alternatively the RaveGeo data can be
accessed with third party GIS products such
as the ArcGIS tools using a plugin. In a batch
process the RaveGeo Compiler reads rela-
tional spatial databases like Oracle and
MySQL and well known vector formats such
as ESRI Shapefiles and VPF and creates com-
pressed multi-resolution RaveGeo data.
Lizardtech: LizardTechs Spatial Express prod-
uct makes it easy to store massive geospa-
tial raster imagery in MrSID or JPEG 2000
format in an Oracle Spatial database. Express
Server can serve large MrSID and JPEG 2000
images efficiently over the web using open
and its industry partners proposed to use
Geography Markup Language (GML) to repre-
sent geospatial information in a JPEG 2000
image. In early 2006, GMLJP2 was approved
by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) as
the open standard for representing geospa-
tial metadata in a JPEG 2000 image. By early
2007, all of LizardTechs products will fully
support GMLJP2.
If a user wants to make a comparison or
evaluate a compression product, why are
the criteria like file size ratio, data-flow
reduction, time performance, information
entropy, memory footprint and resource
consumption of the compression and
decompression algorithms, quality loss
in case of lossy compression, etc. used
and why are they important?
Idevio: All factors mentioned are important
when comparing the compression features.
In addition to the above I would like to add
criterias for streaming and multi-resolution,
as these features are more important than
compression for the overall performance,
especially for vector data. Our clients say
that besides technical aspects, ease-of-use
and intuitive programming interfaces made
them chose our software. In addition our
clients put forward the high quality in soft-
ware and process as a major factor for
choosing RaveGeo from Idevio.
standards such as WMS. Additionally, both
MrSID and JPEG 2000 are supported in
almost every major GIS application, meaning
you can compress your imagery with confi-
dence and know that youll be able to work
with it in your GIS applications.
How is georeferencing/geolocation for
source data integration from various
coordinate systems handled in your
product(s)?
Idevio: Source data integration is handled
outside of the RaveGeo products. RaveGeo
stores information about the coordinate sys-
tem in the RaveGeo database in a way simi-
lar to the OGC standard along with other
meta-data. This means that tools reading the
data can reproject it if needed.
Lizardtech: LizardTechs products require that
the imagery is georeferenced to begin with.
Once that imagery is introduced in
GeoExpress, or any of LizardTechs other
geospatial products, that georeferencing
information is preserved. LizardTech provides
a number of different ways to represent
geospatial metadata in MrSID files, including
MrSID metadata, GeoTIFF-style tags, or word
files.
One problem that impacted the adoption
rate of JPEG 2000 was the lack of a geospa-
tial metadata standard. In 2003, LizardTech
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
37
Speci al
' t be Solved with Just Hardware
The RaveGeo Architecture, Idevio.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:50 Pagina 37
Lizardtech: Evaluation of compression prod-
ucts and technologies depends on the care-
ful tradeoff of a number of factors. For exam-
ple, the typical user who wants to achieve
the smallest possible file size while still pre-
serving as much image quality as possible
has to deal with at least four issues. First,
the visual fidelity of an image can be judged
in many different ways; an image with some
distortion might appear to be perfectly
acceptable to one class of users, but be
totally unacceptable to another class of
users. Second, one technology might require
a lot of CPU time or consume a lot of mem-
ory (RAM) to compress an image to the
desired size and quality; again, for some
users this performance hit may be an accept-
able cost, but for others it may not. Third,
different compression schemes have different
degrees of suitability for different workflows;
some schemes allow for instant decompres-
sion of scenes within the image, but at a
corresponding cost of encode time and pos-
sible image quality. Fourth, different types of
imagery can have dramatically different inter-
nal characteristics, which can greatly influ-
ence the acceptable degree of compression.
LizardTech has always had three approaches
to this problem. First, we urge users to care-
fully understand what their performance and
workflow needs are, and to perform testing
and benchmarking with their own imagery
on their own systems. Second, while our
tools are designed with default settings
appropriate for the most common use-cases,
we strive to provide maximum flexibility in
our tools for the more advanced users who
want or need to achieve optimal results in
particular areas. We provide project files and
profile mechanisms to enable users to store
their preferred encoder settings, so that they
can reuse and share these setting among
users and jobs. Finally, we also include
image optimization functionality, enabling
users to compress their imagery losslessly
and then at a later date quickly extract a
highly compressed version from that master
file, allowing for myriad quick workflows
from one source file.
A question on vector image compression.
How does it differ in terms of compres-
sion technology and algorithms from the
raster image compression?
Idevio: RaveGeo works conceptually much in
the same way as the raster counterparts
ECW from ER Mapper and MrSID from
LizardTech although the data structure is fun-
damentally different. Source data in standard
geographic vector formats is converted in a
batch process by a compiler to the com-
pressed multi-resolution format. In runtime
there is a server that reads the compiled
data and distributes it over the Internet to
reader components that unpack the data so
that it can be used in applications.
The RaveGeo Visual Compiler reads the
source data and generalizes it into multiple
resolutions and compresses it using a loss-
less algorithm. The RaveGeo Server sends
increments of data to a client RaveGeo
DataReader that puts them together so that
the application can use the data like it
would use the original data, potentially with
a lower resolution.
Lizardtech: LizardTechs products do not treat
vector imagery, only raster. However, vector
imagery is typically much more lightweight
than raster imagery. While statewide cover-
ages for vector imagery may measure 100MB
in size, a statewide raster image mosaic can
easily be hundreds of gigabytes in size.
A question on multi-spectral raster
image compression. Compression
schemes generally use some method to
reduce the number of components within
each spectrum (compression in the spec-
tral domain) and then apply some com-
pression scheme on the resulting image
channels (compression in the spatial
domain). Can you give us some further
details on how the compression of multi-
spectral images is done in your product?
Idevio: Not applicable for vector data.
Lizardtech: LizardTech supports multispectral
images for encoding to JPEG 2000.
LizardTechs implementation compresses all
bands in the image equally, similar to the
way we perform compression on traditional
3-banded images.
What is your opinion about standards in
compression? Do you agree with the
view that the declared standards are
often first very complicated to develop
and then difficult to learn and/or hard to
implement? What do you think of data
formats and products which due to their
wide acceptance in the industry and
among the users grow to become de
facto standards? Can both types of stan-
dards learn from each other? Is your
company involved in any of the several
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
activities in the fields of protocols and
standards?
Idevio: When it comes to vector compression
there are few standards available and there
is no standard format for streaming multi-
December 2006
38
Speci al
Patric Nordstrom, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Idevio.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 09:22 Pagina 38
resolution geographic vector data. That's
why Idevio decided to create RaveGeo. For
large and dense vector datasets today's
standards are no real options to our vector
format RaveGeo.
Our approach is to provide programming
interfaces rather than to describe the physi-
cal storage format. This way our format can
provide important functions to the developer
such as incremental transmission, caching,
seamless access, and tiling. Idevio follows
the OGC activities but is not a member.
Lizardtech: Standards are always hard to
agree upon, but once done they can make
things much easier. For instance, the pro-
posal and approval process that LizardTech
and our partners went through for using
GML as the standard for geospatial metadata
within JPEG 2000 imagery took years, but in
the long run it should make it much easier
to achieve interoperability among applica-
tions.
Certainly LizardTechs experiences with MrSID
can be valuable to the market. Weve been
working with wavelet imagery for the better
part of ten years, and feel that we can trans-
late that knowledge into making both MrSID
and JPEG 2000 better and easier for cus-
tomers to use. With JPEG 2000 in particular,
weve found that many users are not aware
that the settings you use to create a JPEG
2000 file are very important, especially when
dealing with geospatial-sized raster imagery.
JPEG 2000 provides so many dials and
knobs for encoding that while you can cre-
ate images that perform very well, you can
also quickly run into performance problems
by using settings incorrectly. Organizations
such as NGA have put together their own
JPEG 2000 encoding standards to help miti-
gate these problems, and LizardTechs prod-
ucts fully support these.
How would you evaluate the compres-
sion market? From the outside it seems
a vivid market, with sometimes fierce
competition and with a lot of potentials
still waiting to develop fully. How does
the market situation look from the
inside?
Idevio: The market interest for vector com-
pression is very good and studies shows
that the interest increases thanks to larger
and more detailed databases, larger need for
vector data, more application areas and so
on. Compared to image compression which
has been around for years, vector compres-
sion is in an early phase. Idevio was first to
launch products for compression of geo-
graphic vector data and has few competitors.
gons are sufficient. However, we know that
our technology is very well fit to stream also
3D meshes and models. This is something
that is on the roadmap for coming versions.
Lizardtech: LizardTech has traditionally
focused on two-dimensional raster images.
We are exploring options for incorporating
support for imagery used to represent 3D
data in the future.
In your opinion, what development in
the field of compression can we expect
in the near and far future? Where are
the limits of compression? Are the new
mass storage technologies and the fast
growing of mass storage and processing
capacities working against the need for
improving compression or do they actu-
ally accelerate it due to the growing
needs of the users and due to exploiting
new possibilities of geospatial data use?
Idevio: From where we stand the need for
compression methods and especially multi-
resolution methods for vector data is
increasing. Better mass storage leads to larg-
er databases. For vector data our multi-reso-
lution makes it usable. Our clients face big
performance challenges, which can't be
solved with just hardware. That's why they
turn to us, and it's simply cost efficient to
ten-fold performance using a smarter soft-
ware.
Lizardtech: There is an old adage that stor-
age is cheap. But while storage continues to
get cheaper and cheaper, imagery continues
to become of higher and higher resolution as
sensors get better and better. Additionally,
with raster imagery becoming more and
more common in users workflows, organiza-
tions are starting to maintain collections of
temporal raster data, resulting in large
datasets being added year after year. With
the amount of raster imagery in the field and
with the amount of new imagery being col-
lected, compression is going to continue to
be important in easing the management and
use of geospatial raster imagery.
Joc Triglav (jtriglav@geoinformatics.com) is a
contributing editor and columnist of GeoInformatics.
Idevio can be found at www.idevio.com, Lizardtech
at www.lizardtech.com.
Lizardtech: JPEG 2000 certainly has the
potential to level the playing field. As an ISO
standard, it means that many organizations
can implement JPEG 2000 encoders and
decoders. However, not all JPEG 2000 images
are created equal: while the resulting JP2 file
should be able to be opened in any JP2
reader, the process used to create the file
can vary greatly as can the resulting image
quality.
Another trend were seeing is that while JPEG
2000 is a great technology, there are so
many images in the world in MrSID format
that it is difficult for many organizations to
migrate completely to JP2. Its likely that
well still be seeing a mix of SID, JP2,
GeoTIFF, and other raster image formats in
the geospatial industry for the near future.
In your opinion, how far are we from
this practical solution available world-
wide: users are enabled to easily access
and overlay raster and vector maps and
images, compressed in different tech-
niques, requested from different web
mapping servers in a Spatial Reference
System specified by the user. Is such a
solution possible at all?
Idevio: For us this is definitely reality, we
have clients today who mix streaming raster
and vector data in that fashion in non-public
systems. We expect that today's static image
based web map services will soon be
replaced with the more dynamic streaming
services in the coming future. Simply
because the performance is much better.
Lizardtech: With technologies being devel-
oped by the OGC such as Web Mapping
Services (WMS), Web Coverage Services
(WCS), and Web Feature Services (WFS),
were getting closer and closer to this envi-
ronment. LizardTech has been involved with
OGC for years, and can interoperate with this
ecosystem using the WMS functionality in
LizardTechs Express Server.
3D is the hot word in geospatial tech-
nologies development lately. Major
geospatially oriented software companies
emphasize that their new geospatial
products are fully 3D enabled. How does
this affect your compression product
development?
Idevio: The increased popularity has raised
the priority for supporting more 3D function-
ality. Our products already today handle
geometries in any dimension. Most vector
datasets are though still in 2D and our exist-
ing geometry types: points, lines and poly-
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
39
Speci al
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:50 Pagina 39
Geospatial data is often voluminous - it takes up large amounts of disk space, requires
a long time to process, and occupies a long time to transfer across networks. This is
a longstanding problem which is aggravated in some network-based applications
because network bandwidth is usually less than the bandwidth inside a computer
(bus bandwidth).
By Sam Bacharach
Web Service Query
The service interface and encoding standards
developed in the Open Geospatial Consortium
(OGC) have changed the usual paradigm from
bulk transfer of files to service-based access to
data residing on a Web server. A Web service
query typically results in a response consisting
of a relatively small amount of data, and Web
services applications can provide near real-
time interactivity, so overall work efficiency is
greatly improved. This ability to get only the
data I want is one way around the problem of
large geospatial data files. But sometimes the
amount of data requested is still too large,
and data compression must be part of the
solution.
Data compression is widely used to deal with
the problem of bulky data files. Compressing
data sometimes also reduces processing time,
but the main benefits are in storage and trans-
mission. It should be noted that
compression and decompression
require time to process, which
may be significant or insignificant
in an application. in this article
we look at work that has been
done in the OGC to deal with
data compression for imagery and
for vector-based data.
XML in JPEG 2000
Though there are many image
compression formats, JPEG 2000,
a product of the Joint
Photographic Experts Group stan-
dardization committee (not the
OGC) is rapidly becoming the
standard for high-quality image
compression in the geospatial
domain. Like most image formats,
JPEG 2000 is used in other indus-
try domains, but it includes a number of
enhancements important for geospatial appli-
cations. One enhancement is the ability to
embed eXtensible Markup Language (XML)
data in a text-based box that accompanies
the compressed image data.
XML is a key Web standard for encoding data
in a format that enables both humans and
computers to read it. In industries of all kinds,
experts have worked together to define XML
schemas suitable for encoding their industries'
data. XML enables one insurance company's
accident report, for example, to be converted
on the fly into the accident report format
used by another company.
Geography Markup Language
Independently of the JPEG 2000 effort, geospa-
tial experts in the OGC developed the
Geography Markup Language (GML), an XML
grammar for encoding geographic information.
(GML is on track to join JPEG 2000 as an ISO
standard.) After both JPEG 2000 and GML had
been developed, a joint effort between the
JPEG working group and OGC led to a new
OGC standard called OpenGIS(R) GML in JPEG
2000 for Geographic Imagery (GMLJP2)
Implementation Specification, released in
February, 2006. This standard defines the
means by which the OGC Geography Markup
Language (GML) is to be used within JPEG
2000 images for geographic imagery.
JPEG 2000 doesn't specify mechanisms for
georeferencing an image, describing the sensor
model used to collect the image, specifying
styling, defining feature attributes, or correlat-
ing features within the imagery to other GIS
datasets. These and other things are possible
with GML in JPEG 2000.
Application Schemas
It is important to distinguish GML from meta-
data formats. GML is a language used to con-
struct definitions for things like features and
geometries. By itself, it doesn't define specific
features. GML is used to construct application
schemas for use within a given application or
system. A GML application schema is an XML
schema specific to a particular geospatial
application. It describes the object types
whose data the application must expose. For
example, an application for hydrology would
define object types such as streams, lakes,
and oceans in its application schema. Those
object types in turn reference the primitive
object types defined in the GML standard.
GML, a very large specification, is made man-
ageable by GML application schemas that pare
away unnecessary XML tags, tailoring the GML
data for efficient use in a particular applica-
tion. The application schema accompanying a
JPEG 2000 image can be accessed via stan-
dard XML linking and referencing mechanisms.
Synergy
Many simple uses of JPEG 2000 don't need
GML, but as both standards become more
widely used, there will be great synergy in
being able to use them together. As user com-
munities begin to use the Web for accessing
geospatial services and data, and as they
become familiar with application schemas that
simplify the use of GML, GML is becoming the
geospatial language of the Web. It is used to
December 2006
40
Speci al
Data Compression and OGC S
GML Becoming the Geospatial Language of the Web
GML in JPEG 2000 supports JPEG 2000 features such as JPEG 2000's
ability to notate and encode/decode specified regions of interest in an
image, which has value in interactive client/server applications linked
through narrowband networks.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:50 Pagina 40
describe regions and extents, define and label
features, and express queries. GML makes it
easier to use catalogs to publish and discover
large archives of distributed geospatial data,
and to access this data based on query
parameters. Both vector based and raster
based services can be accessed, such as
mosaicking and layering operations, feature
classification, description and extraction, and
styling for presentation.
Much of the imagery functionality available in
the world of open distributed geoprocessing
will depend on being able to use GML for
characterizing the imagery and its associated
features.
BXML for Compressing GML
Sometimes, even with a well-designed applica-
tion schema, GML files can be unacceptably
large for an application. XML is ASCII text, and
GML is XML, so, compared to binary encoded
geospatial data, GML is both bulky and slow
to process.
To help GML realize its potential, members of
the OGC looked for ways to compress XML. No
standard, open source tool was available, so
OGC member CubeWerx (Canada) developed
the Binary eXtensible Markup Language
(BXML) and submitted it into the OGC's con-
sensus process. BXML is a patent-unencum-
bered binary-encoding format for XML data
which is easy to implement and for which an
open-source C language reference implementa-
tion is freely available as an OGC Best
Practices Paper (www.opengis.org/techno/
discussions/03-002r8.pdf).
Processing and exchanging GML data in a
more efficient way is certainly the most imme-
diate motivation for encoding GML data in
BXML. One of BXML's important features is
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
41
Speci al
that it allows lists of floating-point geospatial
coordinate values to be directly represented as
raw-binary arrays. This provides both compact-
ness and improved processing throughput
since converting coordinate values to and from
a text representation is time-consuming.
BXML provides markup-for-markup-compatible
binary encoding of XML data. That is, the
encoding is lossless. An XML file that has
been encoded and decoded is the same as
the original unencoded file. BXML is remark-
ably efficient: compression ratios of 5:1 to 10:1
are common, and some files compress at a
ratio of 25:1. BXML works with GML and with
any other XML data.
Sam Bacharach (sbacharach@opengeospatial.org) is the
Executive Director of Outreach and Community Adoption
for the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC).
Standards
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:50 Pagina 41
Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com December 2006
45
Practical Satellite Navigation
Part 8: Data Acquisition
This last article in the series on data acquisition provides an abstract of the entire
series. Furthermore it will go deeper into data acquisition: what is important during
the survey, how to perform quality control and what to look for when processing
the data?
By Huibert-Jan Lekkerkerk
Less Coverage
This series started with an overview of differ-
ent GNSS systems and the signals transmitted
by them. With that came the knowledge that
the satellite orbits are designed in such a way
that there is less coverage over the poles. As a
result the north-south precision is always
lower than the east-west precision.
Since GNSS measures both a three-dimension-
al position and the actual time we need at
least 4 satellites, but preferably more, for a
position fix. If we want to use GPS as a syn-
chronization tool, we need to factor in the so-
called leap second, one of the most forgotten
error sources in GPS. The leap second is deter-
mined twice a year but is usually adjusted
only once every so many years.
Error Sources
It was shown that there are a great number
of - potential - error sources influencing the
satellite signal such as:
Selective availability (switched off at 1
May 2000);
Tropospheric and ionospheric delays;
Multi-path.
A dGPS receiver can compensate most of
these errors, especially if the receiver can
receive multiple channels. An important mea-
sure for the quality of the satellite configura-
tion is the so-called Dilution of Precision or
DOP. The DOP comes into many flavors, but
the main flavors are the HDOP and the GDOP.
Furthermore the Root Mean Square (RMS)
plays an important role in carrier phase dGPS
quality control.
DGPS Techniques
Differential GPS or dGPS comes in two basic
varieties, code phase and carrier phase dGPS.
The former gives a precision of some decime-
ters or more in the horizontal plane while the
latter gives a precision of centimeters in three
dimensions.
Most dGPS systems, with the exception of
post-processing options, need a telemetry link.
This can be an Internet, GSM or radio-link.
Choosing a receiver depends largely on future
use. Besides the precision (dGPS technique),
the robustness and usability of the receiver
play an important role in the decision which
receiver to buy.
Installation
The installation of a full dGPS system (base
and rover) is certainly more difficult than
imagined by some. When installing a base
one needs to take into account items such
as stability, position determination, radio
coverage and potential error sources.
Setting up a rover on a (mobile) platform
has its own issues with the selection of a
location being one of the foremost.
Furthermore the antenna position needs to
be determined accurately.
After installation the following settings
should be examined critically:
Initial position when using a clean
receiver;
Antenna height;
Geodetic reference system;
Measuring method;
Storage/telemetry of data;
Elevation and de-selection of satellites.
Survey Plan
Before the actual data acquisition can start,
it is customary to write a survey plan. The
central question during the writing of the
survey plan is always the original request/
type of project. Depending on the project
type, one or more survey techniques will
be selected. On a number of projects addi-
tional, more traditional instruments such as
the Total Station will be selected besides
the GPS, in order to determine the location
of objects that are hard to reach.
The survey plan should also state how the
quality control should be realized. As a
general rule the quality control on a GIS
project will be of a different order than
that of a land survey project.
Data acquisition on a GIS project usually
involves collecting feature attributes as
well as the feature location. The attributes
to be collected need to be specified in
advance taking the geo-database of the
client as a starting point. The attributes
then need to be defined in the acquisition
software and included in the survey
instructions.
Results of long term monitoring. After installation the base station sank approximately
1 centimeter. This sinking was corrected in July 2001.
Ar t i cl e
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:51 Pagina 45
December 2006
46
Ar t i cl e
Quality Control
Apart from the quality control of the base
station as mentioned in the previous articles,
attention should be given to the quality
control of the survey. Custom dictates that the
position of a control point is checked at least
at the beginning and end of a series of mea-
surements.
With a project lasting a number of days it is
also advisable to start each survey day by
measuring the last point of the previous day.
When using multiple instruments on a single
project it is important to check the various
instruments on the same control point in order
to check the instruments against each other.
It is highly important that the results of these
check measurements are compared with the
true position of the control point in the field.
This way action can be taken at an early stage
when discrepancies are found.
Monitor Station
On some projects a fixed monitor station is
used that collects and stores positioning
data. Usually the data is only looked into
after a long period of time or if problems are
found. By that time the survey has already
been concluded and it will be hard if not
impossible at all to perform any corrections.
A monitor station functions at its best when
a knowledgable person checks it more than
once a day. Furthermore the results should
be processed on a daily base.
The figures accompanying this article show a
number of specific cases where a systematic
checking of monitor results prevented the
delivery of imprecise or erroneous data.
Data Acquisition
Surveying with the current generation of GPS
receivers is very easy. If the system is set up
correctly it is just a matter of positioning the
antenna directly over the point to be sur-
this level should always be mentioned in the
survey administration if not logged by the
software.
Data Validation
When the survey is concluded, the data usual-
ly needs to be validated and processed
before the results can be delivered to the
client. With post-processing no results are
available without further processing. During
validation the quality of the results should be
checked rigorously. But the results should not
only be checked against the survey plan, but
also against reality. When surveying a road or
dam, the survey points are usually more or
less in a straight line. Deviations in the order
of the survey precision are normal, but larger
deviations are an indication of an erroneous
measurement resulting from multi-path for
example.
During data validation the survey administra-
tion provides useful clues if kept up to date.
Examples are statements such as point hard
to reach or additional measurement of
pole in front of dam which will give much
veyed and storing the data. There are how-
ever some items that require additional
attention.
First the number of measurements used in
averaging is important. When this number is
too small the effectiveness of the averaging
is small. When too large the measurement
takes too long and production falls.
Depending on the precision required, an
averaging of 3 to 10 good, high quality, mea-
surements will do the job.
Furthermore all measurements should be of
good quality. Depending on the receiver
used the RMS or the DOP can be used as a
guideline. With carrier phase measurements
the RMS is preferred since it gives a better
approximation of the precision.
Every now and then it happens that a sur-
veyor adjusts the prescribed RMS or DOP
alarm level in the field. The usual reason is
that the set level prevents data collection on
some difficult points. The result of changing
the alarm level is that the survey is per-
formed far more quickly but that the results
will be of a questionable quality. Changing
Results of a monitoring cycle of 12 hours. At 2/3 of the plot strong fluctuations in the
signal are visible caused by overheating of the base.
Monitoring results looking fine at first glance. When examined closely it shows that
the height degrades in the second halve of the plot.
Results of short term monitoring (15 minutes) with a separate antenna on a control point.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:54 Pagina 46
Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
additional information and will
facilitate making a decision
about keeping/discarding the
point.
Data Processing
The last step before delivery of
the data to the client is data pro-
cessing. This involves creating
the final products such as a CAD
drawing or GIS file from the vali-
dated data. Data processing usu-
ally takes place in a different
software package than the one
used in data acquisition and vali-
dating. A point of attention in
this process is the conversion of
the original files to the end
result. Often the resulting files do
not include the original metadata
such as the survey- and geodetic
system used or the estimated
precision. This seems to be a
result of the digital age since in
the old days all survey drawings
had an elaborate legend showing
all relevant metadata. Most digi-
tal end products, with the gener-
al exception of digitized draw-
ings, lack this metadata. As a
result products are used for pro-
cesses that they were not intend-
ed for with all the risks involved.
There is however an international
standard for geographic metada-
ta, the ISO 19115 standard. Using
this standard will enhance the
finding and correct use of geo
information.
Finally
With this article the entire satellite navigation process from satellite
to end product has been described. With article space limited, not
everything was discussed in detail. Hereby I would like to invite
the readers to send me additional items to be discussed. With suf-
ficient interesting questions another issue of this series could see
the light of day. Starting next issue a series on geodetic systems
and chart projections can be found in this magazine.
Huibert-Jan Lekkerkerk (hlekkerkerk@geoinformatics.com) is a freelance
writer and trainer in the fields of positioning and hydrography.
105 297 21 11 2006 14 06 Uh 1
The author of this series on data
acquisition performing a review survey.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:54 Pagina 47
Latest ESRI GIS Developments i
Discover the Power and History of GIS
November 5, it is marathon time in Athens. While the runners have all the space they
need to get to the finishing line, irritation grows behind the steering wheel. Frustration
is expressed by the deafening sound of horns, while traffic agents are eagerly trying
to get cars, buses, lorries and mopeds to the other end of the street. It is not
surprising that a big city like this with 2 million inhabitants, almost one fourth of all
Greek inhabitants, gets clogged occasionally. Still it makes you wonder if the situation
couldnt be drastically improved with an enterprise wide GIS like the one Jeremy Harris
implemented when he was mayor of Honolulu.
By Sonja de Bruijn
Without doubt the ESRI European conference
has an excellent atmosphere. This year
Marathon Data Systems is the host for this
annual event with president Adonis Kontos
making sure everybody feels welcome. In
total there are around 2500 visitors, around
1200 of them young Greek students. A quite
remarkable fact since there are only two uni-
versities in Greece that focus on GIS. The
students that are present at this conference
have a background in areas like planning or
software engineering.
For one moment we are all grandchildren lis-
tening to our grandfather of GIS, as Roger
Tomlinson calls himself when approaching
the stage on November 6, the first day of
the ESRI European conference. And a proud
grandfather he is, praising the audience by
saying God, you have done a lot of work.
After the words the future is in my great-
grandchildren he introduces Jack father of
ESRI Dangermond with the words he is one
of the few good men I know who really want
to make a change.
Just like at the International ESRI User
Conference Dangermond talks about GIS as
a new medium for understanding and the
web, the so-called GeoWeb, becoming a new
platform for sharing knowledge, or serving
each other. In this respect the president and
founder of ESRI mentions ArcGIS as a foot-
print to geo on the web. The rest of his
keynote address involves ESRIs activities
over the past two years, which mainly con-
centrated on the 9.2 version with most of
the things mentioned were already dealt
with at the 26th Annual ESRI International
User Conference in San Diego, USA, August
7-11, 2006.
Biggest Growth Market
In his keynote address Dangermond briefly
mentions that there has been 10-15 per cent
growth for ESRI over the past year and
GeoInformatics asks David Maguire, ESRI
Director of products and international, to
elaborate on this. The biggest growth mar-
ket still is Europe, the central and eastern
part included. We are talking about a growth
of 15 per cent over 2006 which boils down
to 20 million euros, mainly in utilities. A
good example of this is Germany where we
have been working on an implementation
project with utility company RWE over the
past twelve months. Another big European
project which has been running for some
time now is Telefonica in Spain. It is the
largest Spanish telecom company for fixed
networks which replaced its legacy system
with Network Engineering of Telcordia based
in ArcGIS technology. Later that day Frank
Holsmuller, Regional Marketing Manager
Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), com-
ments that a European distributor meeting at
the conference earlier on made evident that
almost every European ESRI distributor has
utilities as number one on the list of growing
markets. His explanation: In the past we
worked on technology which made our soft-
ware more attractive for this sector. Now we
have reached the point where our distribu-
tors know how to reach these customers. It
is a matter of having the right persons with
profound knowledge of the market on the
right spot.
Maguire also mentions Health and Human
Services as one of the emerging markets, to
which Holsmuller adds examples like the
December 2006
48
Conf er ences & Meet i ngs
Father of GIS Roger Tomlinson: Different streams of thoughts should come together.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:54 Pagina 48
mapping of diseases such as bird flu or the
foot and mouth disease, or hospitals using
GIS for facility management. In the UK GIS
in health care is quite strongly represented,
partly because of their new health structure.
An example of a company active in this field
is MapInfo, a company developing software
specifically designed for national health ser-
vice organisations and trusts in the UK.
On-line Version ArcGIS
It is not surprising that since the
International ESRI User Conference in San
Diego in August not that many new features
have been added to the 9.2 versions of the
ESRI software. However Maguire mentions
some of the features that have been added
over the past few months: There now is an
on-line version of ArcGIS, formerly known as
ArcGIS web services. Gazetteer services,
mapping and multi-point routing are possi-
ble. Furthermore it is possible to geocode a
prise level. ESRI has many partners in this
field, such as Oracle, SAP, SAS, Hewlett
Packard, and Microsoft. Besides this we are
partnering with the European Union
(Eurostat, Brussels, Belgium) and
EuroGeographics with participation in initia-
tives like EuroRegional Map. With this last
point being made GeoInformatics asks
Maguire if he agrees with Former Director
of Ordnance Survey UK and president of the
City University (London) David Rhinds
statement during his keynote presentation
the day before that GIS professionals should
move into positions on a decision-making
level in order to make GIS the tool used in
decision making. However Maguire thinks
we are already going the right way with
many local and national governments already
working with GIS and Jeremy Harris as a
good example of a mayor who strongly
believed in the power of GIS for his city
Honolulu.
telephone number in the USA. Also available
in the 9.2 version is business analyst on-line.
In short it means that you can use demo-
graphic data for geomarketing, currently only
available in the USA. But the main thing for
the 9.2 releases is that there is more empha-
sis on functionality instead of data.
Maguire is especially excited about the anal-
ysis, modelling and geoprocessing capabili-
ties and improvements of the 9.2 releases.
He mentions ArcGIS Server as the showcase.
The main difference with previous versions
is that instead of a focus on the developers
side we now extended functionality which
makes the server software much more
approachable for less experienced users as
well. There are more specific purpose appli-
cations, for example focused on parcels, or
the environment. There now is a single inter-
face, from data creation to the final output.
We want to make clear that GIS is not a
vertical anymore but technology on enter-
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
49
Conf er ences & Meet i ngs
in Ancient Athens, Greece
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:54 Pagina 49
Volcano Smog?
Now that we are talking about that: have
you ever been to Honolulu, capital of
Hawaii? Did you notice the volcano smog
when you were there? If not, you were either
not paying enough attention, or you simply
didnt believe it to be volcano smog. And
right you were because it was air pollution
and nothing else. When Harris was mayor of
Honolulu from 1994-2004, he noticed that
his city was far from being well-organised
and suffering from things like air pollution
and a decline in the number of tourists and
real estate investment. He also noticed that
cars were first priority in Honolulu, a failed
paradigm that spoiled environment. Our
cities are not sustainably designed, he
makes clear to the audience during his
keynote. And adds Because we never
regarded them as complex systems that
need to be managed. His answer to this: an
enterprise-wide GIS. Harris, not experienced
in GIS, clearly has a firm belief in the use of
such GIS to get more insight into decision-
making, and make the public understand
decisions by making visualisations. In the
90s we invested in an enterprise-wide GIS
and all departments were tied in, as well as
the private sector.
One might argue if all of this is actually
called GIS but fact is that the city of
Honolulu started working hard on things like
wastewater management, environmental
monitoring, applying GIS route analysis for
waste collecting, and evaluating structures in
a district for redevelopment. Applause from
the audience when Harris says: Cities, or
the local government, need to make
changes, not the national government. Just
look at the neglect of the Kyoto protocol by
the US government. We need to do it our-
selves. And if cities say they cant afford a
GIS? Then Harris answer will always be: You
cant afford not to use GIS.
Geodatabase Replication
The second and third day of the conference
are filled with technical workshops and
paper sessions. ESRI users can learn how to
use cartographic representations in ArcMap
at 9.2, how to work with geodatabase repli-
cation in ArcGIS 9.2 or hear about whats
coming for ArcGIS developers at 9.2. Paper
sessions are taken care of by ESRI users and
ESRI partners like Miner & Miner, Topcon,
Hewlett Packard, Tele Atlas-Italy, and Leica
Geosystems Geospatial Imaging. The non-
partner papers concentrate on aspects such
as Environment and Natural Resources,
Cadastre/National Mapping, Unique & OGC
Standards, Health/Archaeology, and Energy
and Utilities/Portals.
There are also sessions dedicated to trans-
portation, with application areas like high-
way construction project management, fleet
management, electronic toll collection, and
pan-European decision support. Later on Ian
Koeppel, Business Development manager
ESRI Europe, provides general insights into
the field of transportation. His words make
evident that the main issue is interoperabili-
ty, not only in systems (linking GIS and CAD)
but also between modes of transport such
as rails roads, waterways and airports.
December 2006
50
Conf er ences & Meet i ngs
November 15: ESRI Announces ArcGIS 9.2 is Shipping
ESRI announced the availability of ArcGIS 9.2, which includes new
productivity tools, data visualization and analysis capabilities,
sophisticated cartographic tools, high-precision coordinate storage,
and expanded support for standards. This release also introduces a
new workflow for authoring, serving, and using geographic data.
Highlights of the ArcGIS 9.2 release include the following:
ArcGIS Server 9.2 delivers a complete Web GIS for spatial data
management, visualization, and analysis. It is an open and inter-
operable server that supports clients including ArcGIS Explorer,
out-of-the-box browser-based applications, ArcGIS Mobile, and
ArcGIS Desktop. ArcGIS Explorer supports a wide variety of 3D
mapping services as well as geoprocessing services for spatial
analysis. ArcGIS Mobile is included in the ArcGIS Server software
developer kit and supports mobile application development for
the .NET platform. In addition, models and applications authored
with ArcGIS Desktop as GIS services can be used by all ArcGIS
Server clients;
A new method for storing cartographic representations and a
suite of advanced drawing and symbolization tools to help users
automate tasks and perform the complete cartographic produc-
tion process within the GIS;
New visualization and analysis tools allow users to create, play
back, and export time-based animations and graphs of how pro-
cesses evolve;
High-precision coordinate storage and greater flexibility in dis-
tributing enterprise GIS data which ESRI believes will expand the
use of large GIS systems across dispersed offices and regions.
Users can create and share complete or partial database repli-
cates (copies), synchronize and reconcile edits and changes, and
create archives of transaction histories;
Expanded interoperability with spatial data. ArcGIS continues to
support the growing array of open data standards including Open
Geospatial Consortium GML Simple Features data, the ISO 19139
metadata standard, and DXF and KML. In addition, there is
enhanced support for reading, exporting, and working with CAD
drawings from AutoCAD and MicroStation;
Usability and quality enhancements, such as an improved tables
experience and new navigation tools and keyboard shortcuts.
ArcGIS 9.2 is a full release of ArcGIS Desktop (ArcInfo, ArcEditor,
ArcView, and ArcReader), ArcGIS Server, and ArcGIS Engine. All ArcGIS
9.1 users who are current on their maintenance will automatically
receive ArcGIS 9.2 at no additional cost. Outside the United States,
contact your local distributor. For more information about ArcGIS 9.2,
visit www.esri.com/whatsnew on the Web.
ArcGIS 9.2 makes it possible to deliver GIS capabilities to large numbers of users
over networks with Server-based GIS.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:54 Pagina 50
Koeppel also brings forward that there are
links to be drawn between transportation
and utilities. Motorways are being managed
increasingly as utility services which must
generate revenue to pay for maintenance
and operations. Geospatial data manage-
ment improves the planning, maintenance
and operations of roadways in many ways.
An increasing number of large transportation
projects are being funded by Public Private
Partnerships (PPPs) as an alternative to tax-
based financing. Infrastructure operations
and finance organizations are turning to GIS
to attain greater efficiencies in asset lifecycle
management to assure greater return on
investment. Regarding airport management,
Koeppel points out that airports are like
cities, which must operate with zero toler-
ance for failure. GIS technology has a long
successful track record in improving city and
airport operations. Another trend that
applies to the transportation sector are the
liberalisation of markets such as postal ser-
vices, railroads and rail freight operations
which must break out of their old monopo-
listic models to modernize operations and
improve services to compete in the private
sector for business. GIS technology is being
rapidly adopted to bring new efficiencies to
these markets.
Thinking About GIS
Father of GIS Tomlinson has been involved
in GIS since 1960, made every possible mis-
take to make and doesnt want anybody to
make the same mistakes. So there is his
book called Thinking about GIS (second
edition now available via
http://gis.esri.com/esripress), seminars not
only at ESRI conferences, and Tomlinson
Associates, an advisory firm with offices in
Canada, the US and Australia.
His seminar on November 5, one day before
the actual start of the conference, starts a bit
later because the marathon in Athens is clog-
ging the streets, but this doesnt mean the
presentation is shorter than a full day. Step
by step Tomlinson explains what kind of
data are interesting for a GIS, what a GIS
does and how to implement GIS successfully
within an organisation. Every now and then
he shares thoughts on things he himself
encountered during his long walk on the
windy path towards a successful GIS. Here
are some of them: Dont think digital data
are going to solve every problem, Only
when you know what you want to get out
do you know what to put in (and if you
dont know you probably wont get there),
then youll be like a blind man walking
around with money, looking for a vendor to
sell you anything. Provide them (the per-
ing the seminar might sound quite straight-
forward, it does make sense to first think
about a GIS instead of starting to plan right
away. Now and then Tomlinson also makes
predictions for the future, like the web and
mobile devices becoming more and more
important, a handheld being a perfect
means to tell a server what to do.
Altogether the seminar combined with the
235-page slide print-out should give the 27
people present good insight and inspiration
on how to establish a successful GIS within
the organisation they are working or going
to work for, taking into account all kinds of
(organisational) aspects.
Sonja de Bruijn (sdebruijn@geoinformatics.com) is
editorial manager of GeoInformatics. Via
www.esri.com more information on ESRI as an
organisation and its products can be obtained.
sons that need your system) with what they
want, not what someone else has got, and
the persons telling you what to do should
assign what comes out of the GIS.
Missions and Goals
Quite interesting is the so-called GIS cost
waterfall, which shows the cost of a change
in the several stages of developing and
implementing a GIS: $ 1 in the requirements
stage, $ 10 in the design, $ 100 in construc-
tion and $ 1000 in implementation (Source:
Moody, 1996, Database Programming &
Design, October, 57-64). Tomlinson also
stresses several times the importance of
finding out the missions and goals of the
organisation a person is going to work for.
As he says later on during a short one-on-
one: If you are not allowed to speak to
some senior manager to find out, then
leave.
Tomlinson is aiming at three target groups:
young GIS managers, senior executives and
students who want to become GIS man-
agers. Different streams of thoughts should
come together, he comments. He agrees it
is a very difficult and hard job for a young
person, but those who succeed are probably
so successful they can easily find the job
they really want and share and enlarge their
experience.
Though some of the aspects dealt with dur-
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
51
Conf er ences & Meet i ngs
On November 5 many people ran past this statue to get to the Olympic stadium, the finish of the marathon.
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:54 Pagina 51
December 2006
52
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Lewis and Clark Bicentennial
Two Hundred Years of the Historic Trail Through the Ame
Two hundred years ago Meriwether Lewis and William Clark leading the Corps of
Discovery explored, surveyed and mapped then unknown lands between the
Mississippi and the Pacific coast, USA. In GeoInformatics 7 readers could already start
taking a short voyage along the trail of this epic story and learn of the influence of a
single map on the last two centuries of history of the USA and its nations. In this
issue the journey continues.
By Joc Triglav
Expedition Start
On May 14, 1804 the expedition started from
Camp Wood, comprised of approximately 45
men, coming from several regions of the USA,
having various national backgrounds and vari-
ous professions. They travelled upstream of
the Missouri River in a heavy loaded keelboat
and in two smaller boats. The means of travel-
ling had to be adapted to the natural circum-
stances of the river and included sailing, row-
ing, use of setting poles and pulling the boats
with ropes. Their daily progress was about 20
kilometres.
Soon they started to meet the Indians on their
way. In early August the first official meeting
with the delegation of Oto and Missouri
Indians occurred north of present-day Omaha,
Nebraska. During this meeting, Lewis and Clark
established their routine protocol used later in
the subsequent meetings with Indians, com-
prised of handing out peace medals, 15-star
flags and gifts, as well as showing their tech-
nology like magnets, compasses, telescopes
and Lewiss air gun. Also the
captains gave speech
announcing that the Indians
have a new great father in
the east and promising peace
and prosperity without wars.
At the end of August the next
friendly meeting was held,
with Yankton Sioux near pre-
sent-day Yankton, South
Dakota.
In September the expedition
entered the Great Plains and
met several unknown animals,
like coyotes, prairie dogs and
many others. Observing plants
and animal life was one of the
set priorities of the expedition
and during the entire expedition the captains
have described in their journals 178 plants and
122 animals. At the end of October the expedi-
tion reaches the richly populated earth-lodge
villages of the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians
near present-day Bismarck, North Dakota. With
about 4,500 inhabitants the population
exceeded those of the big cities in the east at
that time. Lewis and Clark decided to build
their winter dwelling of Fort Mandan just
across the river of the main Indian village. The
fort was built complete just on Christmas Eve,
when the expedition crew moved in to shelter
against an extremely cold winter.
In Fort Mandan Toussaint Charbonneau and
his young wife Sacagawea joined the expedi-
tion as interpreters. Charbonneau was a French
Canadian fur trader living among the Hidatsa
Indians and Sacagawea was a Shoshone
Indian girl, captured by the Hidatsa Indians in
her childhood and sold later to Charbonneau.
The captains knew they needed Charbonneaus
experience, while Sacagawea proved later to
be a valuable crew member as an interpreter,
guide and counsellor in the fields of plants
and animals, foods, natural medicine and simi-
lar.
All the Way to the Pacific
During spending harsh winter time in Fort
Mandan Sacagawea gave girth to Jean Baptiste
and so the baby boy became the youngest
member of the expedition. In early April 1805,
Lewis and Clark sent the big keelboat with a
crew of a dozen men downstream Missouri to
A picture of bear shooting from the journal book of the expedition A Journal of the Voyages
and Travels of a Corps of Discovery from the year 1810, showing Clark and men in bear hunt-
ing. The men had many close encounters with the bears during the expedition, but they were
most impressed by the big and ferocius grizzly bears. (Source: http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/)
On their way back home Clark carved his signature and date in a sand-
stone pillar named Pompy's Tower, which is the only remaining original
artefact of the expedition on the entire trail from Mississippi to the Pacific
Ocean. (Source: www.eiu.edu)
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53
Ar t i cl e
dispatch the maps, reports, Indian artefacts
and various scientific specimens to Jefferson.
The rest of the expedition continued on their
way upstream the Missouri River in two small
boats and six dugout canoes. Lewis wrote in
his journal that We were now about to pene-
trate a country at least two thousand miles in
width, on which the foot of civilized man had
never troddenI could but esteem this
moment of my departure as among the most
happy of my life.
At the end of April they reached present-day
Montana, amazed at the big herds of buffalo
and other animals. Meat was on the expedi-
tions menu in great abundance in those days.
Just a few days later, after crossing the mouth
of Yellowstone River, Lewis killed an enormous
bear, a grizzly. Grizzlies ran into them often
across the entire Great Plains and due to their
ferocity men grew great respect for these ani-
mals.
At the end of May the expedition entered the
At the end of August the expedition equipped
with horses proceeded to the northwest
through the valley of a beautiful Bitterroot
River and ascended the steep and heavily
wooded Bitterroot Mountains, described then
as the most terrible mountains I ever
beheld. The mountains extended much far-
ther than they expected and the men were
already starving, when they finally met Nez
Perc Indians near present-day Weippe, Idaho
at the end of September. One of the creeks
crossed in that period was named Hungry
Creek, describing best their condition. A friend-
ly welcome of the Indians has put the expedi-
tion quickly in the move again. A chief named
Twisted Hair showed them how to use fire to
hollow out pine trees and make canoes and in
a few weeks the expedition crew pushed five
new canoes into the Clearwater River, travel-
ling downstream for the first time since they
left St. Louis. They were travelling fast now
and soon passed the Snake River to reach
Columbia River in mid October.
On October 18 Clark spotted the snow covered
Mount Hood in the distance, a fixed point on
the expeditions map, named so after a British
admiral Alexander Arthur Hood in 1792.
Namely, the explorers have reached the north-
western coast of North America sailing the
Pacific decades ago. Among them were
Russian explorers Vitus Bering (of Danish
nationality) and his deputy Aleksei Chirikov in
1741, Spanish explorers Juan Perez, Bodega y
Quadra and Bruno de Hezeta in 1774-75 and
the British captain James Cook in 1778.
As the leading explorers of the American
northwest the historic mark was written by the
British captains Robert Gray and George
Vancouver, who were exploring the inner parts
of the coast and also made first detailed maps
of the coastal region. In 1792 Gray discovered
the mouth of Columbia, naming it after his
ship. The goal of the British explorers was also
to discover and conquer the legendary water-
way across the North American continent,
which they named the Northwest Passage.
However, they did not succeed to come very
far from the coast to the inland.
So, Mount Hood was one of the previously
known remarkable landmarks with known geo-
graphic position, which meant that the expedi-
tion was finally nearing the Pacific coast. Soon
they passed the Columbia Falls and entered its
Gorge on their way to the coast. On November
7 Clark thought he saw the ocean in the dis-
tance and wrote in his journal his most
famous words (in modern spelling), "Ocean in
view! O! The Joy!" But they were still more
than 30 kilometres from the ocean, at the
eastern coast of Grays Bay, where fierce
storms and high winds with heavy rain from
area of sandstone formations on the Missouri
River, present-day White Cliffs of the Missouri,
which Lewis described, and it seemed as if
those scenes of visionary enchantment would
never have an end. Two weeks later Lewis
scouting ahead of the expedition reached the
Great Falls of the Missouri, the grandest sight
I ever beheld and discovered that there are
four more waterfalls distanced closely
upstream. So, the grandest sight had to be
paid by the portage of all their stuff for about
thirty most difficult kilometres through the
broiling heat, hail storms and many other nat-
ural obstacles, which took them nearly a
month to pass. At the end of July they reached
the Three Forks of the Missouri, where
Sacagawea began recognizing familiar land-
marks from her childhood, which meant that
they were nearing the home of her people, the
Shoshone Indians.
In early August, Lewis reached the last ridges
of the Continental Divide on the present-day
border between Montana and Idaho to find
the most distant fountain of the waters of
the Mighty Missouri, in search of which we
have spent so many toilsome days and
restless nights. Climbing the final ridge at
present-day Lemhi Pass Lewis expected to see
a vast plain to the west with a large river flow-
ing down to the Pacific. He expected to be
able to confirm the existence of the Northwest
Passage, of which numerous explorers have
only dreamt for centuries. However, this was
the moment of truth for the expedition,
because all Lewis had seen were more moun-
tains. Lewis and Clark knew with no doubt
they needed horses instead of boats in order
to proceed further to the west. In mid August
they reached a Shoshone village, where
Sacagawea is used as a translator to negotiate
for horses. An unbelievably lucky coincidence
helped them, as it turned out that Shoshone
chief Cameahwait was indeed Sacagaweas
brother and the captains immediately put a
spot on their map, named Camp Fortunate.
Part II
e rican Northwest
What would Lewis have written of the sight of the Great Falls after Ryan Dam was built over them in 1915 to
produce electricity? (Source: www.falcon.secureconsulting.net)
When Lewis reached the Great falls of the Missouri on
June 13, 1805 he wrote in amazement that the
irregular and somewhat projecting rocks below
receives the water in its passage down and brakes it
into a perfect white foam which assumes a thousand
formsfor 200 yards in length and about 80 feet per-
pendicular. (Source: www.l3-lewisandclark.org)
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55
Ar t i cl e
the Pacific stopped them for three weeks of
the most disagreeable time I have experi-
enced, as Clark wrote disappointedly in his
journal. Clark made an estimation of the dis-
tance they travelled from the mouth of the
Missouri to the Pacific coast. Using calculation
based on dead reckoning his estimation was
6700 kilometres.
It was the end of November and the expedi-
tion had to build a temporary dwelling again
to spend the winter. Following a vote of all
crew members they built Fort Clatsop, named
after a neighbouring Indian tribe and located
on the south side of the Columbia. There was
a cold and rainy winter ahead of them, during
which the homesickness was the prevailing
feeling in the crew so far away from their
homes.
1806 Returning Home
During the winter the men mostly just waited
for springtime when the weather finally
allowed them to set off for home at last. At
the end of March they presented Fort Clatsop
to the Clatsop Indians and turned back
towards the east again. Under the Bitterroot
Mountains they met the Nez Perc Indians
again, who provided them with food while
they were waiting until late June for the snows
to melt before trying to cross the mountains.
After crossing the Bitterroot Mountains the
expedition has split into groups in July with a
goal to explore the Louisiana Territory a little
bit more. At moments the groups were as far
as 500 kilometres apart.
In early August the expedition crew was united
again downstream from the mouth of the
Yellowstone. In mid August they arrived back
at the Mandan villages, where they said good-
bye and thanks to Charbonneau, Sacagawea
and the little Jean Baptiste. Travelling down-
stream the Missouri with more than 100 kilo-
metres per day home was nearer every day.
And then finally, on September 23 they arrived
to St. Louis, where people greeted them with
great joy and enthusiasm. The captains and
their Corps of Discovery were cheered as
national heroes in towns all the way back to
Washington, D.C., where they all got generous-
ly rewarded in funds and land by the govern-
ment for their successful expedition and contri-
bution to the nation. Lewis was named
governor of the Louisiana Territory, while Clark
became Indian agent for the West and
brigadier general of the territorys militia.
Anniversary as a New Opportunity
Sometimes it seems that American history
started only with the arrival of the whites to
this continent. Of course, this is far from true.
Scientific evidence and archaeological findings
are proving that certain regions of the conti-
nent were inhabited more than 30,000 years
ago with the ancestors of the present
American Indian nations. For them Lewis and
Clark werent the explorers and discoverers of
unknown lands of the West, but simply foreign
visitors to their homeland, who were always
welcome and throughout their journey they
were strongly dependent of their help, hospi-
tality and generosity, without which they could
not survive and succeed.
Two hundred years ago, Lewis and Clark
mapped on their maps and wrote in their jour-
nals data on more than a hundred different
American Indian nations. There were many
more, of course, living throughout the conti-
nent, having various cultures, languages and
traditions. One characteristic was common to
Map of the West which was drawn by
Clark in January 1805 in Fort
Mandan. The map is a hybrid. Below
Fort Mandan it was based on Clark's
route maps and Lewis's astronomical
observations, while west of Fort
Mandan it incorporated the data col-
lected from Indians at different times
and occasions. (Source: Library of
Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/)
Jefferson was known for his love of precision instru-
ments and Euclidean geometry. He was convinced
that measurement and mathematics can reveal the
very architecture of the universe and that nature's
laws are so regular and reasonable that only rational
inquiry and empirical methods were needed to discov-
er them. Following his belief he recommended Lewis
to take a theodolite like this, manufactured by the
famed English instrument maker Jesse Ramsden.
Theodolite measured precisely both horizontal and
vertical angles, thus replacing both a surveyor's com-
pass and a sextant in surveying and measuring lati-
tude and longitude. In spite of Jefferson's enthusiasm
Lewis decided not to take this delicate instrument to
the rough environment of the West. (Source:
www.lewisandclarkexhibit.org)
Map of the West reflected the explor-
ers' view of the country after their
return in 1806. It showed the Rockies
correctly as a series of ranges. The
courses of the rivers Missouri,
Yellowstone, Snake and Columbia are
drawn based mostly on Clark's own
observations. In the places where the
expedition had not gon, some Indian
information remained. (Source:
Library of Congress,
http://memory.loc.gov/)
For astronomical observations Lewis and Clark used
the sextant, most frequently for measuring the sun's
height in order to find their local time and latitude
but also for measuring vertical heights of topographic
features like the Great Falls.
(Source: www.lewisandclarkexhibit.org)
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57
Ar t i cl e
them all though, their tight connection to the
natural environment. Even their languages
directly express their deep knowledge of natu-
ral environment, which ensured them survival
through millennia. Of about 300 original lan-
guages of the American Indian nations 175 still
exist today, of which 55 languages are still
spoken, but only 20 languages are in daily
use by all age groups. From the year 1778
until today the American Indian nations gradu-
ally had to give away to the US government
8.9 million square kilometres of their lands,
while the remaining 227,000 square kilometres
are still in their hands in numerous separated
territories. It is therefore more than under-
standable, that the American Indian nations
are not celebrating this anniversary, but they
are keeping it in their memories as a break-
line in the lives of their nations.
The anniversary is therefore an opportunity to
shake hands for the second time to make true
the motto of peace and friendship from the
Jeffersons peace medal, to a new start of the
mutual future in deep respect and understand-
ing between all the indigenous and immigrant
nations of the North American continent. Only
this way the mission of the Lewis and Clark
expedition will truly be accom-
plished.
Joc Triglav
(jtriglav@geoinformatics.com)
is a contributing editor and
columnist of GeoInformatics.
Web sources for additional information
www.loc.gov/exhibits/lewisandclark - an extensive description of exploration of the North
American continent through centuries with rich pictorial and cartographic sources.
www.lewisandclark200.org National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Commemoration Council
website.
www.lewisandclarkexhibit.org virtual exhibition of the Missouri Historical Society.
www.edgate.com/lewisandclark - virtual exhibition of the Smithsonian Institute.
www.lewisandclark.org - Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation website.
www.pbs.org/lewisandclark - website of the Ken Burns movie 'Lewis and Clark: The Journey
of the Corps of Discovery' with information on expedition, journals, and so on.
www.ngs.noaa.gov/LewisAndClark - NOAA's National Geodetic Survey Lewis and Clark
Bicentennial website.
lewisclark.geog.missouri.edu/website/lewisclark1/viewer.htm and http://lewisclark.geog.mis-
souri.edu/website/lewisclark2/viewer.htm - websites with interactive maps to follow the
beginning and the end of the expedition.
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~atlas/america/maps.html and
www.reisenett.no/map_collection/histus.html - a collection of maps of the territories of
American Indian nations and of the history of territorial growth of the USA.
The version of Clark's
map that was published
with the journals eight
years after the expedi-
tion's return and which
had a great impact on
eastern images of the
West. The western part of
the continent is shown as
a unit with the eastern
part, providing an image
of the United States
extending all the way to the Pacific. It showed rivers with names like Jefferson and Madison, confirming US claims
to the lands. The emphasized interlocking river routes, implying a ready-made transportation system giving access
to huge stretches of arable country. Missing on the map are Indian names, towns, trade routes, hunting territories
and sacred sites. The tribes themselves were presented, but their social and symbolic landscape was erased. The
map showed what Jefferson wanted: an essentially empty land, open and ready for settlement. (Source: Library of
Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/)
In recognition of the 200th anniversary of the Lewis
and Clark expedition, David Rumsey and
Telemorphic, Inc. created this mosaic of expanding
geographic knowledge and development of the
American west. Using historical map content from the
David Rumsey Collection, the central portion of the
1814 Samuel Lewis map of Clark's original drawing
was merged with and surrounded by the General
Land Office's first complete land survey, completed in
the late 1870's. These were then merged with a map
from the 1970 USGS National Atlas. All three were
then placed within a mosaic of Landsat satellite
imagery from NASA. Moving outwards from the expe-
dition's route shows not only how the country has
changed since 1806, but how technology has changed
as well. All four components of this mosaic have been
georectified so as to geographically match one anoth-
er. Using a GIS, numerous identifiable landmarks
were located on the maps and matched to a common
coordinate system. Using these locations as control
points, the entire map is then warped and stretched
to conform to this coordinate system. (Source: David
Rumsey and Telemorphic, Inc.)
To honor Lewis and Clark's contributions to mapping,
NOAAs National Geodetic Survey (NGS) is installing a
series of commemorative brass Corps of Discovery II
markers (shown in the lower right part of this map
image) along the route that Lewis and Clark traveled,
beginning in Monticello in Virginia and ending at
Fort Clatsop in Oregon. NGS is positioning these
markers using modern techniques, including the
satellite-based Global Positioning System. The mark-
ers will become part of the National Spatial Reference
System (NSRS), the federal standard and foundation
for all positioning and navigation activities in the
United States.
(Source: www.ngs.noaa.gov/LewisAndClark)
Mt. Hood spotted on the horizon was the first reliable
sign to Lewis and Clark that the Pacific Ocean is near.
Here the mountain is shown in a beautiful view from
the Trillium Lake. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
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Geosimulating the Swarming Ci t
Managing Complexity
Think about a city as an ant-hill. Despite the evident limits of such analogy, the great
advantage of this approach is that it highlights the stupendous complexity we are all
embedded in, so deeply that we usually tend to forget it. Just think about all the
people you fugitively perceived on your way to work this morning. Try to remember
those you interacted with, and try then to imagine those you couldnt see. Imagine all
these individual lifelines, in parallel most of the time, sometimes crossing each other
at specific nodes in space and time.
By Arnaud Banos
Scientific Manner
What seems to be an irreducible mess for our
human brain is just the daily routine in our
cities. Does this mean we cannot try to study
it in a scientific manner? Of course not!
Furthermore, it is evident today that wed bet-
ter learn to manage complexity, as we cannot
always reduce it. In such a perspective, we
propose a bouquet of alternatives, showing
different visions of the city on the move.
During this tour, well first present a place-
based approach to urban mobility, providing a
global thus dynamic view of the swarming city,
based on Monte-Carlo simulation and map
animation. Then, we will shift to a people-
based paradigm, trying to recover by simula-
tion and to visualize individual space-time
paths from a given mobility survey at hand.
Finally, we will present the SAMU prototype.
This allows exploring pedestrians/cars interac-
tions in a brand new way, based as it is on
agent-based modelling and parallel computing.
Traffic Zones
The first approach [Banos and Thevenin,
2005] deals with very classical aggregated
data, available in most of the cities today,
see Figure 1. Basically, the urban space is
divided in a limited number of traffic zones
(1), allowing building a typical origin/destina-
tion matrix (2). Each cell of this matrix is
filled with an estimate based on sampled
surveys and traffic counts of the number of
people leaving one traffic zone (origine) and
going towards another one (destination), for
a given time period (usually a typical week
day). In the example we are dealing with,
based on the French city of Besanon,
800 000 trips were estimated that way.
The key idea then is: using complementary
data on the temporal distribution of these
trips and on the location of residential,
working and shopping places (3). Can we try
to allocate these 800 000 trips within traffic
zones, directly to the buildings (4)?
This computer intensive simulation, called
Monte Carlo, based as it is on pseudo ran-
dom numbers, then allows producing differ-
ent views of the city, for successive time
periods, see Figure 2. The depressions reflect
areas that are emptying, as people being
there at that moment of the day are leaving.
The up-swellings indicate local accumulations
of population in the given time-slot. The full
animation (http://www.univ-
pau.fr/~banos/banos-animation4.html) then
provides new insights on the global dynamic
of that agglomeration, at least for the typi-
cal day studied. Anyway, despite its good
points, this first approach has a number of
limitations that push us towards complimen-
tary studies. For indeed, we are not dealing
with people here, but with trips, which
means more segmentation and indepen-
dence of one another. Furthermore, there is
no interaction at all in the process, while
urban life is above all based on interactions.
Some scientists even argue that a city is a
typical form of spatial organization that max-
imises social interactions between its resi-
dents.
Individual Movements
For the reasons mentioned above we decided
to shift to a people-based approach. We
tried to reconstruct and reveal - at least partly
- some of the individual movements hidden
Figure 1: Desegregating spatial mobility data in a GIS.
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59
Ar t i cl e
behind this global around the clock view of
the city. After all, some individual data in
most of the larger cities in France are based
on standardized space-time-activities surveys.
They provide very detailed information on the
mobility behaviour of a limited but represen-
tative number of sampled individuals (typical-
ly around 1 per cent of the living population),
for a typical day of the week again.
The precise locations and routes of individu-
als are unknown which makes these data far
from perfect. However their accuracy is good
enough to allow us reconstructing - in a GIS -
the possible routes of these individuals. This
problem clearly belongs to a specific family of
routing problems under spatio-temporal
constraints, where multiple locations are
maker. Therefore, it makes sense to provide
a complimentary view of the swarming city,
allowing handling different scales of the phe-
nomenon under study at the same time.
White and green dots are still identifiable,
but enhanced with a third dimension.
Extruding picks give an estimate of the num-
ber of individuals present in the close vicini-
ty during the given timeslot (here 7:47 am).
The idea, therefore, is clearly to provide a
place-based and an individual-based view of
the urban anthill in the same document,
showing local as well as global trends.
These two complementary approaches have
one thing in common: they rely on our abili-
ty to draw specific images of the city on the
move from datasets at hand, with the idea
of revealing the hidden complexity of these
social organisms. But invoking complexity
has a strong implication: it is indeed difficult,
if not impossible, to study the properties of
a complex system by decomposing it into
functionally stable parts. This strong limita-
tion of the analytical perspective encouraged
us to move towards a more appealing
paradigm, broadly embedded in the science
of complex systems, and methodologically
anchored in geosimulation.
Localized Interacting Entities
The science of complex systems regroups a
huge variety of works, being most of the
time transversal to several disciplines and
relying, despite their diversity, on a few basic
principles. Generally speaking, in its broader
acceptation, a complex system consists of a
large number of localized interacting entities,
operating within an environment. These
entities, being human or not, act and are
influenced by the environment they are
unknown and must be
found on the fly, as well as
their corresponding routes.
While being still in
progress, the proposed
algorithm provides prelimi-
nary results that directly
lead to a new question:
how can we visualize a
potentially large number of
individual routes (13 000
here), in order to provide
valuable insights on the
kind of internal movements
a city hosts?
Animations
Obviously, various solu-
tions come to mind when
thinking about it. Figures 3
and 4 show different
screenshots from animations proposed in
collaboration with Bruno Jobard and Julien
Lesbegueries from LIUPPA [Lesbegueries,
2005]. The left part of Figure 3 provides a
global view of the city of Lille (France), at
7:46 am. Green dots are static individuals
while white dots are mobile ones.
Individuals, depicted as dots, follow the road
network, in blue, retracing possible routes of
the 13 000 sampled individuals. The right
part of Figure 3 focuses on a single simulat-
ed path (in red), highlighting our capacity to
follow individuals or groups of individuals of
specific interest.
Of course, while focusing on individuals we
loose the global trend, which is of capital
importance for a planner or a decision-
i ty: a Bouquet of Alternatives
Figure 2: The city of Besanon, France, around the clock.
Exploring and understanding
the swarming city is a major
challenge today, especially if
our aim is to provide tools
useful and relevant enough
to assist decision-making
processes.
Figure 3: Retracing individual paths (Lesbegueries, 2005).
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:55 Pagina 59
situated in. While the behaviour of these
entities may be inspired, guided or limited
by various global trends, it is usually admit-
ted that they are not directly controlled by
upper-level instances. They operate on their
own, having some self-control over their
actions and internal states. From that per-
spective, the study of complex systems
requires the development of new scientific
tools, non-linear models, out-of equilibrium
descriptions and computer simulations,
agent-based modelling being one of these
tools. The key point we are defending here
is that mobility needs not only to be consid-
ered as a specific phenomenon. It also
needs to be included in a much more global
and complex perspective, the urban system
as a whole. Individual movements indeed
occur in an ever-changing environment. They
are defined by constraints and opportunities,
but also nuisances and dangers.
Virtual Laboratories
In order to demonstrate the relevance of
such a perspective, the SAMU prototype has
been specifically designed to explore the
behaviour of pedestrians in interaction with
the motorized traffic, in a virtual city where
most of the phenomenon can be mastered
Conclusion
Exploring and understanding the swarming
city is a major challenge today, especially if
our aim is to provide tools useful and rele-
vant enough to assist decision-making pro-
cesses. Given the complexity of the phe-
nomenon we are talking about, these tools
must be flexible enough to reveal different
but complementary views of the city on the
move. They should highlight various issues
of crucial importance, from global trends
affecting the whole city to much localized
interactions.
References
Banos Arnaud, Thevenin Thomas, 2005:
La carte anime pour rvler les rythmes
urbains, Revue Internationale de
Gomatique, Vol 15, n 1, pp. 11-31
Banos Arnaud, Godara Abhimanyu, Lassarre
Sylvain, 2005: Simulating pedestrians and
cars behaviours in a virtual city : an agent-
based approach, Proceedings of the
European Conference on Complex Systems,
Paris, 14-18 November, 4 p.
Epstein J., Axtell R., 1996: Growing artificial
societies : social science from the bottom
up, Brookings Institution Press, MIT Press,
Washington DC
Lesbegueries J., 2005: Reconstruction et
visualisation des dplacements dune popu-
lation urbaine, Mmoire de DEA en Sciences
Informatiques, Universit de Pau, 38 p.
Nagel Kai, Esser Jorg, Rickert Marcus, 2000:
Large-scale traffic simulations for transporta-
tion planning, Annual Reviews of
Computational Physics VII, pp. 151-202
Arnaud Banos (arnaud.banos@univ-pau.fr) works at
the University of Pau, France.
and studied [Banos et al.,
2005]. This idea of
designing virtual labora-
tories within which artifi-
cial societies can be
grown [Epstein and Axtell,
1995] has become very
popular in the recent
years. It is largely related
to two other fields: sci-
ence of complex systems
and agent based mod-
elling. Moreover, it is firm-
ly embedded in a micro-
scopic approach of urban
mobility, where the world
is represented as much as possible in a one-
to-one way, which means that people
should be represented as people, cars
should be represented as cars and traffic
lights should be represented as traffic lights
and not as, say, departure rates, traffic
streams and capacities respectively [Nagel
et al., 2000].
Hybrid Models
The prototype SAMU directly relies to these
various principles, its originality being defined
by its focus on interactions between pedestri-
an and traffic flows. Developed in NETLOGO ,
SAMU belongs to the family of hybrid mod-
els, combining characteristics of both cellular
automata and agent-based models. Cars and
pedestrians are indeed defined as agents, sit-
uated on an active grid, with which they
interact. Then, agents have to perform specif-
ic tasks, interacting locally with other agents
and with their environ-
ment. Figure 5 shows the
prototype developed in
order to observe and test
these interactions, as well
as emerging parameters,
such as speed of cars or
proportion of cars/pedes-
trians collisions.
While being a work in
progress, SAMU already
provides an ergonomic
platform useful to test the
behaviour of the system
under different configura-
tions of parameters and
to run what-if scenarios.
Anyway, reaching such a
modelling level, without being flooded with
microscopic details, requires an ad-hoc proce-
dure. Crucial principles like reductionism and
parsimony may therefore constitute main
guidelines, in our quest for the identification
of the micro-specifications sufficient to gener-
ate macrostructures of interest.
Figure 4. A multi-scale view of the swarming city (Lesbegueries, 2005)
Figure 5: SAMU, a virtual lab designed to grow artificial cities.
December 2006
60
Ar t i cl e
Prod_GEO_8_2006 27-11-2006 08:55 Pagina 60
Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com December 2006
61
Pr oduct News
Leica TruView and Cyclone PUBLISHER Modules
Leica Geosystems announced two new point cloud
software modules. Leica TruView and Cyclone
PUBLISHER are designed to open the value of rich,
as-built point cloud data to the masses of
Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) and
other professionals. Leica TruView is literally free soft-
ware for everyday professionals who want to view
and measure detailed laser scan point clouds without
having to be a laser scanning, CAD or 3D expert. The
only requirement is that the point cloud information
was generated by Cyclone PUBLISHER. This
new module of Leica Geosystems popular
Cyclone Software publishes as-built or topo-
graphic point clouds and images in a user
friendly, panoramic viewing format. Published
point cloud data can be posted to the web
for immediate viewing, measuring & markup
anywhere in the world. Published point cloud
data can also be saved on local files, on CDs
or FTP sites. Leica TruView lets users view,
zoom in, or pan over point clouds naturally
and intuitively. Using a simple panoramic
viewer approach, users see High-Definition
Survey point clouds on the computer screen
just as if they were standing right where the
laser scanner captured the scan data. Simple
controls let users rotate the view just as if
they were turning, raising or lowering their head. For
measuring in TruView, a click on a pixel in the image
extracts real 3D coordinates; clicking on two pixels
extracts distances. Results appear right on the point
cloud image. Markups are also easy to create, save
and share with peers, service providers, or with
clients for more effective communications.
Source: Leica Geosystems
Internet: www.leica-geosystems.com
Leica GPro Version 3.2
Leica GPro is the main software tool for downloading
and ground processing Leica ADS40 airborne digital
line sensor imagery. It is used to generate georefer-
enced and orthorectified images from the recorded
imagery and positioning data. GPro also allows auto-
matic point measurement for triangulating ADS40
imagery. In this new version 3.2, Leica GPro offers a
new project information file structure. Increased speed
for pixel-wise orthorectification is provided. Plus, Leica
GPro now supports the newly launched ADS40 sec-
ond Generation sensor heads SH51 and SH52. Leica
GPro 3.2 is available for download by Leica
Geosystems Airborne Sensor customers at
www.leica-geosystems.com/GPro.
Source: Leica Geosystems
Internet: www.leica-geosystems.com
Trimble Introduces TrimPix
Technology for Digital
Cameras
Trimble has added TrimPix technology to its
Mapping & Geographic Information System (GIS)
handheld product line. TrimPix technology makes it
easy to link high-resolution digital photographs to
GIS features using selected Nikon cameras. Based
on Connected Photography by FotoNation, TrimPix
technology enables Trimble GeoExplorer 2005 series
of GPS handhelds and Trimble Recon and Ranger
field computers running Microsoft Windows Mobile
version 5.0 software to seamlessly and wirelessly
connect to a digital camera. FotoNation is a develop-
er of digital imaging connectivity software solutions.
Using the handheld device's built-in wireless LAN
(WiFi), TrimPix technology makes it possible for
Trimble users to connect to and receive images from
selected WiFi-capable Nikon digital cameras. Those
include the COOLPIX range of cameras-COOLPIX P1,
P2, P3, S6, and S7c. As each photo is taken, the
Nikon camera quickly and automatically transfers the
digital image to the Trimble handheld GPS receiver
or handheld field computer wirelessly. Once the
photo has been transferred, it can then be linked to
GIS feature and location data in the handheld
device. Trimble customers with the GeoExplorer 2005
series GPS handhelds and Trimble Recon and
Ranger field computers running Windows Mobile ver-
sion 5.0 software can download the TrimPix software
free of charge from the Trimble Website at
www.trimble.com/trimpix.asp.
Source: Trimble
Internet: www.trimble.com
Intergraph Announces ImageStation PixelQue
Intergraph announced ImageStation PixelQue offering
several finishing tools needed in orthophoto produc-
tion for image inspection, quality control, image
enhancement, and image editing. According to
Intergraph ImageStation PixelQue combines all the
tools needed into a single package tailored for pro-
duction, streamlining and
driving productivity
throughout the orthophoto
finishing process.
ImageStation PixelQue
includes many tools for
which users have tradition-
ally employed a range of
applications, many of
which were not designed
specifically for orthophoto
production. By delivering
these tools within a single
application, which is tightly
integrated with
ImageStation OrthoPro,
users benefit from support of four band and 16-bit
images and preservation of georeferencing embedded
in the file header.
Source: Intergraph
Internet: www.intergraph.com
Microsoft and DAT/EM
Announce Unique
Opportunity for All
DiAP/SysImage Users
Microsoft and DAT/EM Systems International have
teamed together to offer users of the DiAP/SysImage
photogrammetric software suite a unique opportunity
to revitalize their 3D photogrammetric workstations.
Working together, the two companies are extending
an offer that allows users to exchange each
DiAP/SysImage workstation license for one DAT/EM
Systems Summit Evolution 3D digital photogrammet-
ric workstation license. This no-cost offer is available
November 1, 2006 through December 31, 2007. Six
months of free technical support will also be included.
By switching to Summit Evolution, DiAP/SysImage
users not only have the ability to work with existing
input hardware and 3D display hardware, they will
also have the opportunity to upgrade their data cap-
ture to MicroStation V8, AutoCAD 2000-series or
ArcGIS.
Source: DAT/EM
Internet: www.datem.com
Industry News 8-2006 27-11-2006 09:20 Pagina 61
Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
63
Pr oduct News
Major New Release 5.0 of INPHOs Photogrammetric System
INPHO has made a major software launch of its digital
photogrammetric software products, which are now
integrated into a complete, perfectly tuned and inte-
grated system. MATCH-AT 5.0, MATCH-T 5.0, DTMaster
5.0 and OrthoMaster 5.0 are released at one time,
along with the new ApplicationsMaster 5.0. This mod-
ule serves as the common core of the V5.0 system for
project set-up and administration. All V5.0 applica-
tions are sharing a new common project file V5 con-
taining all project related parameters, including cam-
eras.
Highlights of the versions 5.0 are:
MATCH-AT 5.0 (for automatic aerial triangulation):
comes with enhanced matching strategies, espe-
cially for imagery from digital frame cameras. New
tie point patterns and new tie point density
options are now considered as well. The results of
self-calibration are now stored as a correction grid.
The correction grid is applied in all photogram-
metric applications from INPHO for compensating
distortions detected by self-calibration. Especially
with digital aerial cameras a proper correction of
these distortions is important, as they can cause
considerable height errors, for instance;
MATCH-T 5.0 (for automated DTM extraction):
incorporates a new multi-image matching strategy
resulting in better DTM derivation than in previous
versions. According to INPHO auto-
selection of optimal ray intersections
and best overlap situations results in
faster processing and better quality
of extracted points. MATCH-T now
derives DTMs from satellite images
as well;
DTMaster 5.0 (for stereo DTM edit-
ing): offers advanced automatic filter-
ing of local areas in LiDAR or
MATCH-T data. Three major cate-
gories are separated from the
ground points: points on vegetation,
points on buildings, and gross
errors. Anaglyph stereo mode can
now be activated if there is no
stereo capable graphics board available. DTMaster
derives DTM data from satellite images as well;
OrthoMaster 5.0 (for orthophoto generation): now
offers rigorous orthorectification of single satellite
images, too. The exterior orientation is computed
by using the given orbital information of satellites
along with generating RPCs. By control point mea-
surement it is now also possible to improve the
quality of RPCs delivered by satellite image ven-
dors. In addition to the hybrid raster DTM, the
built-in terrain modeling module supports also TIN
based DTM interpolation. Control points can now
be superimposed on the orthophotos for checking
the geometric quality.
The new version 5.0 of INPHOs photogrammetric sys-
tem can be downloaded from INPHOs website
www.inpho.de.
Source: INPHO
Internet: www.inpho.de
December 2006
Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imaging Introduces
IMAGINE DeltaCue
Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imaging introduces
IMAGINE DeltaCue, a new add-on module for ERDAS
IMAGINE. This module provides the broad assortment
of image processing tools needed to simplify all kinds
of change detection processes, allowing users to
move rapidly from image to information to results. An
adaptable suite of processing procedures, IMAGINE
DeltaCue provides tools for Broad Area Search for
change across entire images, targeted Site Monitoring
visualization tools for detailed analysis and a cus-
tomized Change Viewer interface specially designed
for change detection studies that allows the user to
produce output in a variety of formats appropriate for
integrating into GIS and other databases.
IMAGINE DeltaCue key application areas include:
Detecting changes in land use and land cover;
Delineating wetlands loss and encroachment;
Estimating forest loss through development or
disease;
Identifying new housing and infrastructure
changes;
Mapping flood extent areas and disaster impact
zones.
IMAGINE DeltaCue key features include:
Analyzes the information present in all bands of
multispectral data;
Multiple change detection algorithms and filters
can be combined and iterated to produce the
desired results;
Eliminate unwanted noise change;
Scalable across imagery types from high quality,
high resolution to low quality, low resolution
sources.
IMAGINE DeltaCue will be available during the first
quarter of 2007.
Source: Leica Geosystems Geospatial Imaging
Internet: www.gi.leica-geosystems.com
IMAGINE DeltaCue enables the user to narrow down
the search to only the types of changes of interest to
their particular application. For example, Figure 1
shows two times of imagery captured over an area
which has seen significant change in many land
use/cover types. Figure 2 shows the varying results
that can be achieved to tailor the analysis to the par-
ticular types of change of interest to the user. The
image on the left is focused on changes in soil cover,
highlighting new dirt tracks and disturbed soil,
whereas the image on the right focuses on vegetation
changes and changes in crop types. (Quickbird
imagery courtesy DigitalGlobe Incorporated.)
Leica fieldPro v1.3 and CADWorx
fieldPipe for Leica fieldPro
Leica fieldPro is an on-site and
on-demand field solution for AEC
as well as surveying. With the
newly launched Leica fieldPro 1.3
Leica Geosystems also introduces
a new solution to the Plant and
Process Industry CADWorx
fieldPipe for Leica fieldPro for
the creation of 3D plant models of
existing piping systems as well as
other plant items. The new
CADWorx fieldPipe for Leica
fieldPro solution interfaces with Total Stations to
capture piping spatial information to create full scale
specification-driven 3D models using proven capabilities
of COADEs CADWorx Plant Professional. Models are
created in real-time, on-site, and without any post-
processing. CADWorx fieldPipe for Leica fieldPro lever-
ages the power and precision of Laser EDM technology
onboard the Leica Geosystems Total Station. The
software allows users to model any piping system with
pinpoint accuracy. To create as-built models, the user
has simply to set up the Total Station, point the laser
at a piping item and pick components from the toolbar
the software places components in the model at
exactly the right position. Now measuring and model-
ing hundreds of pipe components on-site in real-time is
quick and easy. Safety is also improved as it reduces
climbing and clambering associated with collecting this
data. The CADWorx option, supplied by COADE Inc.
through an OEM agreement, represents a full license
of CADWorx Plant Professional. It includes piping, steel,
HVAC, cable trays, automatic isometrics, bills of material
and bi-directional links to stress analysis. This
comprehensive option enables users to develop
3D plant models on-site and in real-time. For more
information on COADE visit www.coade.com.
Source: Leica Geosystems
Internet: www.leica-geosystems.com
Industry News 8-2006 27-11-2006 10:14 Pagina 63
December 2006
64
China to Build Satellite Navigation System
China has announced plans to build a satellite naviga-
tion system that will include up to 35 satellites and
be working in the Asian region by 2008. The system,
called Beidou, will include five geostationary earth
orbit satellites and 30 medium earth orbit satellites.
Navigation services open to commercial customers will
provide users with positioning accuracy within 10
meters (33 feet), velocity accuracy within 0.2 meters
per second and timing accuracy within 50 nanosec-
onds, the report of the Xinhua news agency said. No
details on the costs of the system were reported. It
was also not clear how the Chinese system would
rival the American global positioning satellite system
or the EU's Galileo satellite navigational system which
is expected to be built with Chinese participation.
According to the Xinhua news agency China would
launch two Compass navigation satellites next year
as part of the Beidou project. The system is expected
to cover China and parts of neighbouring countries by
2008, before being expanded into a global network of
satellites.
www.chinadaily.com
Intermap and Definiens to Build EARThemes
Intermap Technologies and Definiens AG have signed
an agreement to develop a land cover vector layer
product called EARThemes, covering all of Germany
and the United Kingdom. EARThemes combines radar
imagery, digital surface models, and IFSAR data and
through an automatic analysis engine creates accurate
land cover datasets. Available beginning January 2007,
EARThemes will consist of a contiguous, contempo-
rary thematic layer of Germany that includes five cate-
gories of land cover: urban, vegetation, agriculture,
water, and rural area. Polygons of non-vegetated and
non-populated areas will include additional slope
information. The data will be available in an ArcGIS
format, ready to integrate into any GIS application
within or outside the ESRI environment.
www.definiens.com
www.intermap.com
PCI Geomatics Announces Geomatica LidarEngine
PCI Geomatics signed an original equipment manufac-
turer (OEM) agreement with Ambercore Software Inc.
for the creation of Geomatica LidarEngine. Geomatica
LidarEngine is a data management, analysis, and visu-
alization tool for Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR)
data. Powered by Ambercore Software, Geomatica
LidarEngines architecture and algorithms are well suit-
ed for processing the very large volumes of LiDAR
data. Capabilities include batch processing, data inte-
gration, enhanced pyramiding, 3D visualization and
geo-referencing for raster data.
www.ambercore.com
www.pcigeomatics.com
PCI Geomatics NITF certified
PCI Geomatics has become certified in compliance
testing with the National Imagery Transmission
Format Standard (NITFS) for their software Geomatica
Focus and Generic Database (GDB). To become NITF
certified, software applications must pass a rigorous
testing and review process by an independent
government board. This process ensures that NITF
files are compatible and interoperable across all
systems. NITF is the standard for formatting digital
imagery and imagery-related products among
members, agencies and departments of the United
States Government. Before a particular system or
product can be employed, it must adhere to the
United States Federal and Department of Defense
(DOD) standards. Compliance testing ensures that
NITF standards are met and interpreted by all vendors
and developers in a uniform manner. To learn more
about the Joint Interoperability Test Command, visit
http://jitc.fhu.disa.mil/brochure/nces.pdf
www.pcigeomatics.com
2007 BE Awards of Excellence Student
Competition
The BE Careers Network launched the 2007 BE
Awards of Excellence student competition. Four win-
ners will receive BE Awards and scholarships during
BE Conference 2007, taking place April 29-May 3 at
the Los Angeles Convention Center in California. The
competition is broken into two categories: college/
university and middle school/high school. Students
and student teams in the college/university competi-
tion can complete a project design of their choosing
in one of three areas: architecture, engineering (civil,
structural, and geospatial), and water. A winning pro-
ject will be selected in each category. Students
enrolled in schools participating in the BE Careers
Academic Subscription program will have access to
more than 50 software applications to complete their
designs. The students and student teams participat-
ing in this years middle school/high school competi-
tion are being asked to design a school of the future.
They must complete their projects using MicroStation
PowerDraft. The software is available to them, free of
charge, through the BE Careers Network at
www.becareers.org.The BE Awards of Excellence
student competition is judged by an independent
panel of experts from academia and industry. The
winners are notified in advance of BE Conference
2007 to enable the students to attend the awards
ceremony and receive well-deserved recognition,
prestigious BE Awards for display in their schools,
and scholarships.
www.becareers.org/awards
www.bentley.com
ESRIs 2007 Survey & Engineering GIS Summit
Includes Civil Engineering
Civil engineering will be a central component of
ESRIs annual survey and GIS conference. This event,
officially renamed the Survey & Engineering GIS
Summit, will take place concurrently with the ESRI
International User Conference in San Diego, California,
June 1619, 2007. The summit will continue to focus
on key topics for surveyors and related industries,
including geodetic control, GPS, integrating surveying
and geographic information system (GIS) technology,
land management, implementing GIS, and working
with government agencies. However, the new pro-
gram will be enhanced to include prevalent issues in
engineering including GIS integration with site and
land development, LiDAR, photogrammetry, engineer-
ing and analysis, and construction and as-built sur-
veying. Paper submissions are still being accepted for
the summit.
www.esri.com/surveysummit
ESRI Northeast Africa Established
ESRI announces the establishment of ESRI Northeast
Africa (ESRI NEA). The newly formed company will
allow the expansion of ESRIs software distribution
into Libya, Chad, and Sudan.
ESRI NEA is a free zone company located in Egypt
with business that is spread across the region. ESRI
NEA was established due to the success that was
demonstrated by Quality Standards Information
Technology (QSIT), ESRIs distributor in Egypt and the
surrounding region since 1994. ESRI NEAs vision is
to be a leader in providing state-of-the-art GIS solu-
tions to governments and businesses in the Middle
East and North Africa.
www.esri.com
Sokkia Qualifies for French GPS Network Teria
Sokkias GSR2700 IS was recently qualified for the
new French GPS Reference Network Teria. Teria was
founded in 2005 and has grown out to be an exten-
sive network of GPS reference stations in France.
Teria is part of the Axagone Holding in France.
According to Teria Sokkia did very well. From now on
all surveyors with Sokkia equipment can sign in for a
subscription at Teria without any problems. For the
French customers of Sokkia this is a cost reducing
solution, because besides this way of measuring with
more accuracy, measuring with only one receiver is
becoming more attractive.
www.sokkia.net
African Satellite Centre Chooses PCI Geomatics
PCI Geomatics software and solutions were selected
by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
(CSIR) Satellite Application Centre, South Africa. The
centre has purchased Geomatica 10 and Geomatica
X, PCIs premiere software suites in remote sensing,
for their inclusion in fully automated preprocessing
chains for the radiometric and geometric correction
of up to 100 satellite images per day.
www.pcigeomatics.com
Online Civil Engineering Community Autodesk
Autodesk has launched an online Civil Engineering
Community website packed with valuable informa-
tion for anyone connected with the industry. The
site at http://civilcommunity.autodesk.com has been
designed as both a forum and resource for all civil
engineers, but particularly those using Autodesk
Civil 3D. It includes discussion groups and blogs,
details of events and webcasts, links to other
online resources plus tried and tested tips and
training to help members get the best from their
technology investments. Users will have access to a
library of user-submitted content including tem-
plates, styles, design standards files, reports files,
and utilities which can be downloaded, free of
charge.
www.autodesk.co.uk
Intergraph Stockholders Approve Acquisition by
Investor Group
Intergraph announced that the stockholders of the
Company voted to adopt the merger agreement
providing for the acquisition of Intergraph
Corporation by an investor group led by Hellman &
Friedman LLC and Texas Pacific Group. Based on
the preliminary tally of shares voted, approximately
99% of the shares of Intergraph common stock pre-
sent and voting at the special meeting (in person
or by proxy) voted in favor of the proposed merger
agreement. The number of shares that voted to
adopt the merger agreement represents approxi-
mately 73% of the total number of shares of
Intergraph common stock outstanding and entitled
to vote as of October 11, 2006, the record date for
the special meeting. The proposed merger was
announced on August 31, 2006 and is expected to
close by the end of November 2006, subject to the
satisfaction or waiver of the conditions set forth in
the merger agreement. Under the terms of the
merger agreement, Intergraph stockholders will
receive $44.00 per share in cash, without interest,
for each share of Intergraph common stock held.
www.intergraph.com
Garmin Wins Dutch Lawsuit Brought by TomTom
Garmin has received a decision of the District Court
in The Hague, Netherlands denying the preliminary
injunction sought by TomTom International in pre-
I ndust r y News
Industry News 8-2006 27-11-2006 10:14 Pagina 64
December 2006 Latest News? Visit www.geoinformatics.com
65
liminary relief proceedings alleging infringement by
Garmin of a European registered design owned by
TomTom. The court also ordered TomTom to pay
Garmin 37,000 euros to cover attorney fees for
defending the preliminary relief proceedings.
Garmins lawsuit against TomTom for infringement of
five Garmin patents is proceeding in the U.S. District
Court for the Western District of Wisconsin and the
trial is scheduled for February 2007. Garmin has
also recently filed a lawsuit against TomTom in the
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas
for infringement of a sixth Garmin patent. After the
Wisconsin lawsuit was filed, TomTom, which does
not hold any U.S. patents for technology it devel-
oped itself, purchased three U.S. patents from
Horizon Navigation, Inc. and then asserted these
patents in a counterclaim in the Wisconsin lawsuit.
Garmin has also filed a lawsuit against TomTom in
the Netherlands seeking a declaration of non-
infringement of the European registered design that
was asserted by TomTom in the preliminary relief
proceedings. In addition, Garmin has filed a lawsuit
against TomTom in the United Kingdom to invalidate
a UK patent owned by TomTom. Garmin currently
owns 285 U.S. patents and 3 European registered
designs and has 165 patent applications pending.
Garmin was recently selected as an inaugural con-
stituent of the Ocean Tomo 300 Patent Index based
on the value of Garmins patent portfolio.
www.garmin.com
Professor Stig Enemark New President FIG
Prof. Stig Enemark from Aalborg University has been
elected as the
President of FIG for
the term of office
1.1.2007-31.12.2010.
The election was
made at the FIG
General Assembly in
Munich, Germany 13
October 2006. At
the election there
were also two other
candidates: Mr. Ken
Allred from Canada
and Mr. T. N. Wong
from Hong Kong
SAR, China. In his
presentation speech to the General Assembly before
the elections Prof. Enemark described his motto: I
suggest that we fly high and keep our feet on the
ground at the same time. By this Prof. Enemark
means that FIG must be able to interact with the
key players in the field such as the UN agencies, the
World Bank, and sister organizations. We should also
be able to interact with politicians at national level to
improve and promote the basic conditions for our
services and our role in society. And we should of
course interact in a dialogue with the individual
member associations and the individual surveyors to
make FIG a relevant and a proud icon for our profes-
sion. Prof. Enemark has proposed an overall theme
for the next period of office Building the Capacity.
What he proposed to be included under this theme
is explained in more detail in his promotion flyer:
www.fig.net/council/enemark_papers/flyer_
screen-version.pdf.
www.fig.net
GeoEye Appoints R. Clapper to Board of Directors
GeoEye announced the appointment of retired Air
Force Lieutenant General James R. Clapper, Jr. to its
Board of Directors. Clapper was the first civilian direc-
tor of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
(NGA). Highlights of his military career include serving
as the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, in
addition to a variety of intelligence-related positions
including Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence and
Headquarters USAF, during Operations Desert
Shield/Desert Storm.
www.geoeye.com
Peter ter Haar Ordnance Survey's new Director
of Products
Ordnance Survey has
appointed a new
Director of Products to
lead the strategic
development of its
customer-driven portfo-
lio of geographic infor-
mation. Peter ter Haar
will be responsible for
all aspects of product
management including
product marketing,
engineering, cartogra-
phy and supply. He
has more than 18
years experience in product management and busi-
ness development in both the public and private sec-
tors in GIS, location-based services and mobile tech-
nology. Recent roles include being head of GIS at the
City of Amsterdam and senior product and technical
management roles in Geodan, Autodesk Europe and
Intergraph Europe.
www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk
John OHara Executive Vice President of
International Operations MapInfo
MapInfo Corporation appointed John OHara to
Executive Vice President of International Operations.
In this role, Mr. OHara will lead MapInfos expansion
strategies in Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA)
and Asia Pacific, and implement MapInfos global
strategy focused on key vertical markets across these
geographies to best serve its global customers.
OHara joins MapInfo from Microsoft, where he
served as General Manager, Enterprise and Partner
Group for Microsoft UK where he was responsible for
sales and services to Microsofts enterprise cus-
tomers. Prior to Microsoft, OHara served as Vice
President of Worldwide Sales and Operations for
Pivotal Corporation, a leading provider of CRM solu-
tions to the mid enterprise, and spent 11 years at
Lotus Development Group and IBM.
www.mapinfo.com
Intergraph 2007
Intergraph 2007 will be held May 21-24, 2007 in
Nashville, Tennessee. In its second year, this interna-
tional conference will be built around the theme
Realize Your Vision, exploring how customers across
the globe are using Intergraph's spatial information
management software to address today's challenges
but also those of tomorrow. Key executives and users
from Intergraph's global customer and partner com-
munity will participate in industry-specific programs
exploring best practices developed to maximize the
benefits of their Intergraph software solutions.
Participants will have the opportunity to share in
hands-on training and networking, to discuss and
evaluate applications of Intergraph's geospatial tech-
nology and engineering software -- from international
user, partner, and Intergraph perspectives.
www.intergraph2007.com
I ndust r y News
People
Conferences & Meetings
New Staff Members GeoInformatics
We are happy to announce that two new editors have
joined the editorial crew of GeoInformatics. We met with
Florian Fischer (ffischer@geoinformatics.com) in Munich
during INTERGEO after having been in contact via email
for some time. Fisher was introduced by EGEA as a
potential candidate for writing reviews of well-known
GIS software. Meanwhile, he submitted his first article on
recent trends in the GIS sector detected at INTERGEO
(see pages 6 and 7 of our October/November issue).
Our other new crew member is Job van Haaften
(jvanhaaften@geoinformatics.com). Job studied Geology
and Communication in Utrecht (the Netherlands). He is
a skilled writer and has worked for several reputated
newspapers and magazines. There is a fair chance that
some of you will meet Job and/or Florian at conferences
and meetings during the next year!
Job van Haaften Florian Fischer
Industry News 8-2006 27-11-2006 10:14 Pagina 65