Geo-information

The imperative of measuring and monitoring our environment is increasingly surfacing as the world’s population is rapidly approaching seven billion people, natural resources are rapidly being exploited and human activities continue to challenge the quality of land, water and air as well as the Earth’s climate. Today’s technology, consisting of ground-based, airborne and orbiting sensors combined with information and communication technology enables to collect, process, analyse and disseminate data about a great variety of processes occurring on our planet. The assembly of methods, approaches and devices developed and under development for dealing with the above challenges is called geo-information technology. Geo-information technology is a rapidly evolving engineering discipline, also called geomatics. Which activities does the field of geomatics comprise and how can geoscientists and professionals dealing with the environment benefit from this sophisticated technology? Where is the technology coming from and how did it evolve over time to what it is today? Where is it heading to? This chapter aims at addressing these topics.

Maps on paper or digital maps alike can make the invisible visible, and thus reveal new insights about the world. Map-making or mapping is one of the techniques to interpret and represent the world and fundamental for representing space and location (Dorling and Fairbairn, 1997). Mapping is only possible if sufficient detailed, accurate and up-to-date geo-information is available. Although availability is an essential prerequisite it is not enough; to be of any value geo-information has to be processed and interpreted by knowledgeable and skilled professionals using the right tools, including Geographical Information Systems (GIS) (Tomlinson, 2007). Today GIS, remote sensing (RS) and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) offer a plethora of opportunities for monitoring and managing many facets of our world, which is increasingly considered as vulnerable and affected by human activities. Geo-information technology provides enormous potential for tackling the broad pallet of problems that tend to be branded by pessimists with the tag ‘unsolvable’. Induced by increased human population, intensification in agricultural land use and industrialisation, deforestation, soil erosion, degradation in wildlife habitat, loss of biodiversity and pandemics such as HIV/AIDS seem to be a never-ending story. This chapter demonstrates by two historical examples – medical mapping and geological mapping – how insight can be gained about Earth-related phenomena through analysing maps. Next the general steps involved for deriving geo-information from geo-data are considered using a GIS.

When one would rank the geo-data collection techniques developed the last three decades or so from most significant to least significant, positioning and navigation by means of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) would head the list. GNSS enables obtaining precise positioning and timing information anywhere on land, on sea or in the air, day or night with high precision and reliability and against affordable costs. GNSS does not require cleared lines of sight between survey stations as other conventional surveying procedures, which rely on observing angles and distances between visible ground stations, required for determining two-dimensional or three-dimensional coordinates of points.

Traditional analogue fieldwork – using map, pen and paper – is increasingly becoming obsolete. Several developments in the ICT realm have firmly stimulated the transition from analogue to digital work flows in many if not all areas of geosciences and geo-information technology. The major driving force steering this transition is that the computer power of handheld devices has been extended to a level that speed of computation and manageable dataset sizes are comparable to what the desktop computers could accomplish just a few years earlier. Together with rapid adoption of the internet, this progress has triggered fitting mobile GIS systems and location-based services (LBS) into work processes requiring data collection in the field or geo-data use while, for example, on the road or on the water.

Since the early 2000s terrestrial laser scanning has evolved from a research and development (R&D) topic to a geo-data technology, which is commercially offered by a multitude of land surveying companies and other service providers all over the world. The technology is primarily used for the rapid acquisition of three-dimensional (3D) information of a variety of topographic and industrial objects. Cultural heritage, bridges, plants, cars, coastal cliffs, highways and traffic collision damage, all can be accurately modelled and documented with laser technology. Lidar is without doubt the most successful data-acquisition technique introduced in the last decade. As an acronym of Light Detection and Ranging, some prefer to read Lidar as Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging – the term has become a ‘proper name’ – spelled like your own first and surname with the initial letter the only capital.

Practitioners who wish to construct and maintain an urban, local or national geographic information system (GIS) or Land Information System (LIS) face the difficult and complex problem of data capture. Images have for a long time been major information sources for topographic mapping of large areas and creating base maps. Taking images is the fastest and most reliable way to capture reality.

The year 1997 marked the start of creating a highly detailed nationwide Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the Netherlands, up to one height point per 16 m², making use of airborne Lidar technology. The accuracy specifications of the so-called AHN were: 15 cm root mean square error (RMSE) and 5 cm systematic error. At that time, commercial Lidar was still in its infancy and many operational hurdles had to be overcome. The AHN project was completed in 2003. Figure 8.1 shows a part of a raw airborne Lidar data set used to create AHN. ‘The Netherlands is flat as a coin. Why you need such a detailed DEM?’ some foreigners laughed, especially those living in mountainous areas. The answer is quite simple: when 40% of a country’s territory is situated below sea level, every decimetre counts in the struggle to keep feet dry.

Permanent observation of the Earth from space started in the early 1970s. It is a method of collecting synoptic imagery of (nearly) the whole globe. During the first 20 years the emphasis was on development of the technology and strategic applications in a strong national context. In the late 1980s, a process of change of mindset started and Earth observation from space gradually moved away from governmental umbrellas to commercialisation and privatisation. Since the turn of the millennium many Earth observation satellites equipped with advanced imaging sensors have been launched. Satellite images with high spatial resolution provide an up-to-date and cost-effective means of producing image maps, derived topographic maps and cadastral maps for all areas of the world. The ability to extract from 5-m to 50-cm imagery a wide variety of topographic data and to locate features at an absolute accuracy of up to 1 m or even better provides an unprecedented opportunity for the cost-effective production of accurate maps of areas ranging from small cities to entire countries.

All sorts of businesses wishing to sell products and services via user-friendly web pages are pushing rapid advances in web development technology. As a result, since the turn of the millennium this has become one of the fastest growing industries globally and important offspring of the worldwide desire to do business via the internet. This chapter starts with treating Unified Modelling Language (UML), a process and tool-independent modelling syntax for building software systems, but also usable for modelling processes involving geo-information such as transferring real estate from seller to buyer. Next we consider Open Source Software and languages to disseminate geo-data over the web.

Ease of use of many geo-data collection devices is high and anyone who can handle a mobile phone can push the right buttons on a mobile GIS device within a few hours of training. This is a consequence of the shift from labour-intensive analogue methods to digital geo-data collection and processing technology. After being collected much geo-information can today be processed in a cheap way by virtually anybody who buys a computer and a GIS package and who is sufficiently skilled to read manuals. However, the processing steps can not be performed blindly. The collection and processing of geo-information involves a chain of activities and not only the data collection itself or information extraction is central but also quality assurance. Measuring and information extraction can be done by anybody, but to arrange the measuring and the processing of the data in such procedures that errors and inaccuracies are avoided with the minimum effort in terms of labour, time and money is a key activity.

The previous chapters have clearly demonstrated that numerous types of massive amounts of geo-data have become and continue to become available for researchers and practitioners. Geo-information technology is an excellent aid in solving a great variety of Earth-related problems. However, all users of geo-data will agree that no single geo-data type can provide the optimal solution for a research-related, development-related or some other problem. This chapter will demonstrate that most applications require fusion of data stemming from multiple geo-data sources. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the following fields of application: urban planning, reconstruction of heritage sites, vulnerability assessment of urban areas, biodiversity, forest biomass mapping and optimal placing of solar panels on roofs. The next three chapters will treat in greater detail use of geo-information in the fields of census taking, disaster management and land administration.

Accurate, reliable, detailed and up-to-date data on where and how a country’s population lives, its age structure, sex ratio, internal migration, condition of health, level of employment, and level of literacy is essential for planning, policy intervention and monitoring of development goals. Such demographic data are fundamental and key for determining location, type and size of schools, hospitals and factories, and future numbers of teachers and medical doctors. It is also vital for the planning and construction of roads, railways, bridges, ports and so on. The most appropriate procedure to acquire data about the population of a country and how they is by performing a population and housing census is because of its great relevance to the economic, political and socio-cultural planning of a country as well as its essential role in public administration, understanding and planning socio-economic developments, and supporting public and private activities census taking has been promoted internationally since the end of the nineteenth century, when the International Statistical Congress recommended that all countries in the world conduct them (United Nations, 2008).

Natural disasters – floods, drought, hurricanes, landslides, earthquakes, tsunamis and volcano eruptions – increasingly cause casualties and damages to infrastructure and property. In addition to huge suffering, the economies of many countries, especially the developing ones, where 95% of all fatal casualties from natural disaster occur, get severely affected as a disaster strikes the region. The role of geo-information technology to support risk and disaster management has been convincingly demonstrated and there is no doubt about its importance (Zlatanova and Fabbri, 2009). The number of geo-information technologies that can support risk and disaster is steadily growing, particularly in developing countries. For example, the Asian Disaster Preparedness Center, Bangkok, Thailand, operational for over 20 years, established a regional network – involving 26 countries – of stations for capturing data for signalising multiple types of hazards.

Land administration is about registering land rights not only to secure these rights for the well-being of individual owners but also to support good governance and sustainable development and to eradicate poverty in developing countries (Williamson et al., 2010). How to register relationships between land and people? What is the value of land and what is its use? Who has what rights on which land? These are some of the questions related to land administration and to maintain land-administration systems or, in many countries, to set these up. Land administration is a millennium old activity aimed at securing land rights and stimulating good land management, an activity that also is increasingly receiving revived (academic) attention since the United Nations and other worldwide political organisations have recognised land administration as an important means in the combat against poverty (see Section 15.20).