ISPRS Project Sponsorship

ISPRS sponsors scientific initiatives to enhance its international status in the field of photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences, and to benefit members. Initiatives include developing new publicity and management issues for Council,  and strengthening ISPRS scientific and education activities. Funding  is on a project basis from the ISPRS Foundation (website 1) and ISPRS current accounts, with a limit of SFr.10,000.- per annum. Projects may last up to three years. The last round of funding was in 2009, when three projects benefited, (see Table).

All have successfully reached an interim stage and have reported on progress. The first project is directed at bringing a virtual learning and research environment to the desktops of students and professors, providing an easily accessible platform for exploring world space and geoscientific processes. Integration takes place at two points: firstly access to geospatial web services via Virtual Globe clients, and secondly by integrating geospatial web service servers and Virtual Globe front-end servers to make accessible managed data via geospatial web services. To support geoprocessing, a web service toolkit named GeoPW  (website 2) has been implemented. There has also been a workshop and seminar.

ISPRS Blog
The ISPRS Blog contains a number of features such as embedded movies postings and a forum where each commission has its own discussion thread to support topics and facilitate inter-member postings. The eventual aim is for each commission to nominate an administrator to moderate blog content. The Blog also contains a sharable Flickr photo album. There are ongoing discussions with Commission presidents and other relevant individuals to ensure that the blog is managed and used by the whole ISPRS community.

Bibliography
There is also now an authoritative online bibliography on Terrestrial Laser Scanning, with methodology transferable to other topics; the domain name for the TLS database, website 3, has been registered and the website is live. It will be officially released during the next reporting period. The HTML template for the website was created using the University of Calgary’s ‘Drupal’ development platform and the database of papers, featuring search capabilities, employs the customised modules built in Drupal. The bibliographical details of 143 journal and conference articles have so far been filed in the database, with all references viewable at website 4.

New Funding
Modest resources enable small projects to be carried out, or kick start larger projects which will benefit working-group and other ISPRS activities. It is hoped that another round of funding will be announced in 2011.