National Spatial Data Infrastructure in Latvia

Hochschule fr Technik Stuttgart

Faculty of Geomatics, Computer Science and Mathematics

National Spatial Data Infrastructure in Latvia

Assignment in module 7: Geodata: Capture, Sources and Standards

Submitted by: Raivis Otto Student ID: 799005 Email: raiviz@inbox.lv

June, 2010

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Introduction
Latvia is a country in the Baltic region in Northern Europe. The capital and the largest city is Riga, with more than 1/3 of all inhabitants in country living in it. Latvia is also one of the countries, which has developed National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). Riga and also other cities, big and small, have been urbanized and provided with the most necessary infrastructure roads, water, electricity, gas and other supplies. Well developed SDI is neccessary for maintenance of this infrastructure and for expandability in the future. There is a number of governmental institutions, private companies and universities involved in maintaining and developing the SDI of Latvia. They share spatial information among themselves, develop and upgrade, it and also provide the information to the stakeholders. The policy framework is established by set of rules, eveloped by Institutional framework participants and accepted by government. The Technical framework is being build depending on the before mentioned rules, technical resources and directives. As far it is not well developed, as a lot of manual work should be done in case of information exchange among different institutions and users. There should be put much more effort on automatization processes for spatial data exchange and also the storage formats.

Insipre Directive
Inspire directive establishes an infrastructure for spatial information in Europe to support Community environmental policies, and policies or activities which may have an impact on the environment. INSPIRE is based on the infrastructures for spatial information established and operated by the 27 Member States of the European Union. Latvia also is one of the Member States, who operates its geospatial information and provides the data according to the INSPIRE directive. The Directive addresses 34 spatial data themes needed for environmental applications, with key components specified through technical implementing rules. There are not yet implemented a lot of these data themes in latvian technical framework, but step by step Latvia is on its way to implement these rules.

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Latvian Geospatial Information Agency

The State agency Latvian Geospatial Information Agency (LGIA) is the successor of the functions, rights, obligations, property and financial resources of the State Land Service in the field of geodesy, cartography and geospatial information after the reorganization of State Land Service in the end of 2005. In accordance with Regulations of the State agency Latvian Geospatial Information Agency the agency has the following functions:

to provide the geospatial information basic data to support North Atlantic Treaty, European Union institutions and the international competent organizations with geodesic, cartographic and geospatial information

to obtain, process and maintain the geographic basic data for civil and military purposes;

to form and develop a joint information system of the geographic basic data;

In order to implement the established functions, the agency performs the following tasks: obtains, processes and maintains the geographic basic data and meta data, forms and maintains the infrastructure of the geospatial information; forms and maintains the archives of the geodesic and cartographic materials; performs the topographical mapping of the state, including:

obtains the images of the Earths surface and the information of remote research;

produces orthophotomaps; forms the digital model of the surface of the territory of the country; compiles air navigation maps;

forms and maintains a toponym data base; surveys the state border; performs polygraphy works; produces and maintains the products of military geodesy and cartography; ensures spreading of geodesic, cartographic and geographic basic data;
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in compliance with the competence, participates in the national and international projects and organizes them;

carries out research in the field of geodesic, cartographic and applied toponymics;

publishes the materials of the research performed by the agency; arranges and maintains the National Geodesic Network, including the Global Positioning System (GPS) base station network called LatPOS, which covers all country;

prepares and publishes the catalogues and dictionaries of geographical names and toponyms;

maintains and develops the infrastructure necessary for the agency activity; pursuant to the competence, develops and submits proposals for the improvement of the regulatory enactments;

additionaly performs other tasks.

To inform the society about LGIAs products and services, a homepage has been created, http://map.lgia.gov.lv/

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The agency works in accordance with the activity strategy of the Ministry of Defence.

The State Land service

The State Land service (SLS) of the Republic of Latvia is a governmental institution, which performs realisation of land reform, ensures the maintenance of National Real Estate Cadastre, ensures the maintenance of Address Register and the information system of protective zones. In accordance with Regulations of the State Land Service, it has the following functions: to maintain the Land exchange register, ensuring and organizing of land exchange processes; to maintain the Real estate market data base; to maintain textual and graphical information in the State Address register; to maintain the State information system of Real estate cadastre and to process the data registration about real estate objects; to perform valuation of real iestates; to perform valuation of real estates for land reform, privatisation, expropriation and rent purposes to perform cadastral surveying of buildings; to realise a proceeding of land disputes; to maintain the register of rural land privatisation and ensure of privatisation processes; to develop the information system of protective zone and process information registration about encumbrances in the Real estate state cadastre information system; to accumulate information from land surveying and dissemination of information for land surveying; to arrange and save materials in the State Land Service archive; to prepare and distribute information from the information systems maintained by SLS; to expertise materials of territorial planning;
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to realize other duties defined by the laws and regulations. The State Land service is under the supervision of the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Latvia.

Rigas eometrs
Rigas Geometrs SIA (RGM) is the capital society of the Riga city municipality. Rigas Geometrs is an institution which performs administration of real estate, inventory of cadastre in the Riga city territory and visualisation of geographical information of the territory. In accordance with Regulations of the Riga city municipality, Rigas Geometrs has the following functions:

to perform the historic map data for land reform and land privatization; this information is of greate importance for Latvian society to restore their properties after the 50 years of occupation during the land reform and for the market economy;

to manage the Address Register; to perform land use planning and cadastral surveying in Riga city; to perform land use planning; RGM is responsible for the geodetic infrastructure, the horizontal and vertical reference network of Riga city, which is the foundation for navigation, location and positioning.

to perform methodic leadership and supervision of the topographic mapping of Riga city;

to perform topographical surveying and mapping; to co-ordinate and manage the development of the geo-information system of Riga city namely RIGIS, to provide State institutions, legal and natural persons with this information;

to manage and supervise the RIGIS layer on underground utilities particularly; to participate in the international programs in the geomatic applications; to control land monitoring and land use; to control road and building construction;
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regularly update and monitor fhe RIGIS; regularly update and monitor fhe large scale maps of Riga city of the scales 1:500, 1:2000 and 1:10 000;

to manage training of specialists, to perform on-job training and attestation; to develop and maintain the technical equipment of the Rigas Geometrs company;

to arrange and save materials in the RGM archive and materials of geodetic, gravimetric, photogrammetric and cartographic mapping;

to realize other duties defined by the laws and regulations, as well as the needs of Riga municipality.

the Riga multifunctional GNSS positioning system is under development in the joint project with Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation of University of Latvia. This includes participation in the project EUPOS.

There are plans for development of positioning methods and geodetic infrastructure for multifunctional positioning and navigation purposes. The plans are developed on the R&D activities together with University of Latvia for the connection of the Riga RTK reference network to the national LKS92. The RGM cartographers have completed their basic task, namely, the production of the 1:2 000 scale map covering the whole Riga city which will be used for land use and city development planning. The RGM has closem cooperation with an Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation of the University of Latvia, is said about Rigas Geometrs future plans.

Other organizations involved

There are a lot of other smaller institutions involved into Institutuional framwork about geospatial data infrastructure in Latvia, but they are less significative. And due to the limited information amount for this assignment they are not mentioned in detail. Among them are some universities, private companies, such as, MDC, who has to control and maintain geospatial data in some particular region of the state and other companies, who do some specific work and bring their share to the common SDI.

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Sources: Regulations of the Cabinet of Ministers Nr.987, Riga, December 20, 2005 (prot. No.76 25.) www.lgia.gov.lv http://map.lgia.gov.lv/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latvia http://vzd.gov.lv/sakums/ http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/

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