Cartography as a Tool for Geospatial Decision Support

GIM International Interviews Ferjan Ormeling

From 25 to 30 August 2013, the 26th International Cartographic Conference was being held in Dresden, Germany, bringing together cartographers and geographic information science specialists from across the globe. In recognition of the importance of the study and practice of mapmaking, GIM International had devoted its August 2013 issue to this event, so it was particularly fitting to feature an interview with Ferjan Ormeling, the prominent Dutch cartographer. Covering cartographic challenges, the power of maps, and lessons that can be learned from the past, Ormeling's views are that of an inspired and inspirational proclaimer of his specialist field. In May 2013... (read more)

2013-08-05 11:17:17

GNSS Positioning

Status and Features

Nowadays, GNSS receivers have scores – and often hundreds – of channels, enabling them to track GPS, Glonass, Galileo and Compass signals simultaneously. The whole workflow from satellite tracking to calculating the coordinates of the position in a preferred reference system can be conducted automatically in real time. The price of GNSS receivers has dropped steadily since the first GPS receivers came onto the commercial market in 1982. In conjunction with the latest product survey results for GNSS receivers (available at www.geo‑matching.com), the author puts today’s GNSS status and features in perspective. (By Mathias Lemmens, senior editor, GIM International, The... (read more)

2012-12-18 01:53:20

Towards Cadastre 2034: Part II

International Experts Speak Out

Bennett and co-authors from the University of Melbourne, Australia, have described six design elements relating to the role and nature of future cadastres, presented at the FIG 2010 congress in Sydney and published in GIM International (July 2010); an inspiring starting point for further dialogue. To encourage discussion we invited leading experts and practitioners to send us their own views and future vision. We received no fewer than ten replies, half of which were printed in the September issue. Here are the remaining five. Cadastre 2014 is an influential publication produced by a FIG Commission 7 working group... (read more)

2010-10-04 04:57:12

Galileo: Commercial Hopes Unrealistic

GIM Interviews Owen M. Goodman, Chief Operating Officer, Fugro N.V.

It is likely to be 2012 before the Galileo system itself is fully operational on a stand-alone basis, says this month’s interviewee Owen Goodman, and Galileo will never be a commercially viable service as long as GPS and Glonass are free. Given current plans, Galileo is heading inevitably towards a funding crisis. National security and defence agencies could make a substantial financial contribution, but this at the expense of Galileo’s status as a civilian system. The EU should leave the fulfilment of specialist civilian needs to commercial GNSS augmentation service providers and the makers of ‘RTK-type’ GNSS equipment, so that... (read more)

2006-02-23 12:00:00

Galileo: Commercial Hopes Unrealistic

GIM Interviews Owen M. Goodman, Chief Operating Officer, Fugro N.V.

It is likely to be 2012 before the Galileo system itself is fully operational on a stand-alone basis, says this month’s interviewee Owen Goodman, and Galileo will never be a commercially viable service as long as GPS and Glonass are free. Given current plans, Galileo is heading inevitably towards a funding crisis. National security and defence agencies could make a substantial financial contribution, but this at the expense of Galileo’s status as a civilian system. The EU should leave the fulfilment of specialist civilian needs to commercial GNSS augmentation service providers and the makers of ‘RTK-type’ GNSS equipment, so that... (read more)

2006-02-23 12:00:00

3D is the New Normal in Switzerland

Mapless Topographic Products Are the Future

Switzerland is unique in that it is still the only country to have switched entirely to 3D for its national object-oriented topographic database. As users increasingly discover the advantages in terms of new workflows and services, nobody regrets leaving the 2D era behind. According to Swisstopo, the extra dimension creates no extra costs – only extra benefits. It took the Swiss Federal Office of Topography (Swisstopo) ten years to build an object-oriented topographic database in 3D, with the last objects having been completed in 2019. “Nothing is excluded now; everything you can think of is available in 3D. Even the... (read more)

2019-08-29 09:42:38

Downtown Dublin as a Lidar Point Cloud

A Highly Accurate, Diverse and Dense Annotated Laser Scanning Dataset of a City Centre

The advance of Lidar data acquisition technologies is substantially increasing the amount of spatial data obtained and it is becoming cost-prohibitive to process it manually. Artificial intelligence (AI) has now started to offer cost-effective solutions to analyse and utilize those big datasets. AI can be employed for scene understanding, accurately detecting objects and classifying 3D assets. These are the significant fundamentals of several applications including autonomous navigation, intelligent robotics, urban planning, emergency management and even forest monitoring. The most popular types of 3D spatial information for such applications are Lidar and imagery data. This article describes the dense annotated ground-truth... (read more)

2019-11-27 10:05:38

Mapping an Oil Pipeline

DEMs and Ortho-imagery for Colombia from Dual-band Side-looking Radar

Adverse weather and terrain conditions meant the Cano-Limon oil pipeline in Colombia had never been accurately mapped until orthorectified images and digital elevation models covering an area of 94,000km2 were created using airborne dual-band interferometric IFSAR simultaneously acquired X and P-band data. The authors report on main aspects of the project. The Cano-Limon oil pipeline extends nearly 780km from the Cano-Limon oilfield in Colombia’s Arauca region along the north-western border with Venezuela to a port in Covenas. When fully operational the pipeline can carry up to 20% of Colombian petroleum production, a major source of national revenue. In collaboration with... (read more)

2006-07-24 12:00:00

The Fierce Rise of Airborne Lidar

A View on Status, Developments and Trends

Today, automatic matching of overlapping aerial imagery and airborne Lidar are the main geodata technologies for capturing dense point clouds of the Earth’s surface. The sampled points are used for the generation of bare ground representations which are often augmented with buildings and trees. Airborne Lidar is flourishing as a prevalent geodata acquisition technology and continues to show a fierce rise in terms of advancements and applications. Read on for an article that discusses the main technological advances of today’s operational systems and surveys the state of the art, developments and trends. Having trained as a geodesist and photogrammetrist, I... (read more)

2017-01-11 09:04:36

Geoinformation in Arable Farming

What’s Hot and What’s Not in Precision Agriculture

Agriculture enthusiastically absorbs geospatial technologies. Precision farming practices in particular benefit from location intelligence. The future in agriculture with geospatial applications is bright. Besides more efficiency on the farm, geospatial technologies also offer new business opportunities and new sustainability concepts. But the adoption of geospatial innovations is lagging behind expectations. So what’s hot and what’s not? This article examines the state of the art in geospatial technologies in agriculture and attempts to forecast the trends. By Tamme van der Wal and Henk Janssen, Wageningen University & Research (WUR), The Netherlands By far the most popular geomatics technology among farmers is... (read more)

2017-02-06 03:09:34