Search

The increase in the frequency of disasters and their associated damages globally is part of a worldwide trend, which results from growing vulnerability and may reflect changing climate patterns. Global risks seem to be increasing.

TopoSys GmbH manufactures and operates high-end fiber based airborne Lidar sensor systems which also include a for spectral optical line scanner. Airborne Lidar sensor systems are capable of playing a dominant role at data acquisition for disaster prevention and disaster management, especially the systems of TopoSys which focus on high precise, high dense mapping.

This paper will address multiple conference topics but will focus on user needs and technology developments. The paper will describe issues of geo-information for disaster management developed around the experiences prior to, during, and following the World Trade Center event of 9/11/01 in New York in which the author was a participant. The events of 9/11 have had a dramatic impact on the state of geo-information in disaster management. Thus, it is a focal point for the paper. The paper will be presented from the perspective of experience and thus is practical rather than theoretical.

The Federal Crisis Centre in Belgium was created in 1988 in the aftermath of a series of tragic events during the 80’s. Its mission is to manage crisis situations at national level: floods, nuclear incidents, chemical pollutions, major strikes, risks for food chains, terrorist threats etc. It consists of 60 professionals, fulfilling their mission 24h a day, offering to partners a “high tech” and ready to use environment for crisis management.

Disaster management depends on large volumes of accurate, relevant, on-time geo-information that various organizations systematically create and maintain. In The Netherlands municipalities are an important party in the safety management chain when accurate geo-information is concerned. As opposed to municipalities in many other countries Dutch municipalities not only carry out central government policies but also have several policy areas in which they operate autonomously. Hence Dutch municipalities have a wealth of geo-information. This is why in the safety management chain Dutch municipalities are often referred to as the fourth column besides the police, the fire department and medical care. However, due to the municipal autonomy the geo-information is structured and described in as many ways as there are municipalities. This results in a situation in which the semantics of geo-information is not even always clear to the producer and whereby formal semantics are almost never available. On the other hand following several large scale disasters such as the fire in a pub in Volendam and the exploded fireworks factory in Enschede Dutch government has decided to reorganise disaster management in The Netherlands in so called safety regions. These regions consist of several municipalities. Thus this development increases the demand for easily accessible and readily available relevant, standardized and accurate geo-information from municipalities on a regional level.

Actual and high-quality data and information — in the most cases spatial data or geo-information (GI) - are the foundation for decision making in disaster management especially in situations where losses are to be minimized and lives are to be saved. Data and technology suppliers are talking about the magic thing: the “user” or “end user”. But, providing innovative products hoping the user will be positive about and spend a lot of money for means more than asking “who is the user?” and “where can he be found?”.

This article introduces synthetically using RS, GIS and GPS technology to study ecosystem changes of Talimuhe river system within past 10 years.

Topographic maps, both paper and computerized, require specific qualifications in the end users - planners, designers, geodesists, etc. These maps offer the user some simplified information about reality, described in accordance with a meaningful set of cartographic conventions. Overlaid with an orthophoto, such cartographic information becomes a photomap, representing the surface in a more realistic way. A non-expert, used to perceiving environmental reality through landscape images taken from the Earth's surface, faces certain difficulties interpreting images collected from an aircraft or satellite. In fact, modern technologies do not provide the mass user with fullvalue visual information about the real environment. The mass-user is not generally concerned about using maps for measurements, but rather uses them to search for some semantic information. Thus, a new, mass-user-oriented branch of GIS should be based on a new concept - geo-information reality, i.e., mass-user-oriented modeling of the environment. The key to this concept is an object-graphic basis for GIS, bringing to bear modern methods of acquiring, storing, and representing visual and textual information in digital form. This paper presents the proposed concept in detail.

We are witnessing the exploding development of Mobile Geoinformation Services(MGS). However, MGS is a complex system engineering involving many different technological fields or disciplines. There are many problems still existing and deserving to be further clarified and studied. Based on the analysis of the derivation of MGS and different related terms, a relatively universal concept of MGS is first defined in this paper. After that, this paper illuminates the present application level in China by summarizing the five modes that exist in all application related to MGS. In addition, five aspects of problems that hinder MGS from developing on a large scale are put forward. Finally the paper concludes that the implementation of MGS can be only performed on a limited basis in current China and there are still many barriers that prevent MGS from reaching its full potentials.

Querying and mining uncertain data has received a lot of attention from the research community in recent years due to the enormous increase of geographically referenced data occasioned by developments in IT, digital mapping and remote sensing. The global expansion of Geo Information Systems emphasizes the importance of developing data driven inductive approaches to geographical analysis and modeling. An important problem is that collected data often is inherently imprecise and may contain incomplete, inaccurate or outdated information. Such data arises particular in dynamic environments. Traditional querying and mining approaches are often inapplicable or may extract misleading or plain wrong information when applied to uncertain data.

All things in our world are related to some location in space and time, and according to Tobler’s first law of geography “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” [1]. Since humans exist they have been contemplating about space and time and have tried to depict and manage the geographic space they live in. We know graphic representations of the land from various regions of the world dating back several thousands of years. The processing and analysis of spatial data has a long history in the disciplines that deal with spatial data such as geography, surveying engineering, cartography, photogrammetry, and remote sensing. Until recently, all these activities have been analog in nature; only since the invention of the computer in the second half of the 20th century and the use of computers for the acquisition, storage, analysis, and display of spatial data starting in the 1960s we speak of geo-information and geo-information systems. [...]

1. A few years ago, I wrote an editorial about the progress in image and data fusion. Today, I would like to take a moment to discuss about some trends in geo-information fusion for the next few ye...

The current issue of the Central European Journal of Geo- sciences contains several papers devoted to advances in remote sensing and geo-information for the environment.

Querying and mining uncertain data has received a lot of attention from the research community in recent years due to the enormous increase of geographically referenced data occasioned by developments in IT, digital mapping and remote sensing. The global expansion of Geo Information Systems emphasizes the importance of developing data driven inductive approaches to geographical analysis and modeling. An important problem is that collected data often is inherently imprecise and may contain incomplete, inaccurate or outdated information. Such data arises particular in dynamic environments. Traditional querying and mining approaches are often inapplicable or may extract misleading or plain wrong information when applied to uncertain data.

The exploitation of coal may cause surface subsidence. One can reduce the influence and damage for the environment if we predict the shape of the subsidence. Combining routine subsidence monitoring technology with geo-information technology and analyzing it, we put forward scientific evidence for control and administering the ecological environment of the mining area. The authors use the Feicheng mining area as the research area and analyze the dynamic change of it. The method provides a rapid and economic means for mining area subsidence monitoring.

This paper concerns the analysis of multi-view imagery in order to obtain a scene description and, specifically, the correspondence problem that occurs in this analysis. The required scene description in this case consists of the classes of the objects present in the scene and their parameters: position, size and orientation. The images are aerial photographs and the objects in the images are man-made objects, such as buildings, roads etc. The goal of the complete system is the fully automatic analysis of aerial photographs of urban areas. The output of the system is a scene description that can be used to generate or update a GIS (Geo Information System). Up to now a system has been developed that performs this analysis on a single image [2, 3]. The advantage of using multi-view imagery compared to using single images is that (partly) occluded buildings may still be recognized, because they can be more clearly visible in other images acquired from a different viewpoint. However, the use of multi-view imagery complicates the analysis, because the objects in the different images have to be corresponded to each other. In this paper a solution to this correspondence problem is presented on object hypothesis level. First the image analysis system for single images is described in short. Then the system is extended for multiple images and the method for corresponding object hypotheses is presented. Finally, experiments and conclusions are given.

The destructive effects of disasters on vulnerable populations will continue to increase as global inhabitants grow in numbers and occupy marginal, often hazard-prone areas. Recent experience has shown that there is a gap between available Geographic Information System technologies and geo-information management tools and their employment during disaster response operations. The goal of this paper is to examine and critique the use of geo-information and related technologies in the Kashmir earthquake of October 2005, discuss what researchers have done to address this topic and make recommendations for improving future geo-information accessibility. This paper draws on observations from the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and available literature to examine impediments to operational geo-information management and utilisation during that relief effort. The paper concludes with recommendations on how to increase the accessibility of geo-information to a diverse group of users and better manage geo-information during future disaster response efforts.

One of the limitations of using GIS for effective decision making is the structure of geo-databases which have in the past been designed principally to generate cartographic products. Given that the basis for GIS is the need to understand the spatial context of features and events, the criteria for the storage and management of spatial information should be more than just the representation of that data in a cartographic form.

Geographic information systems which store, manipulate and display spatially-referenced datasets have been in existence for many years. These systems have traditionally been used to handle digital map data in vector form, but more recently they have been used to handle raster-based imagery of the Earth's surface. There is now a need to establish integrated geo-information systems (IGIS) based on major environmental databases with intelligent front-ends, and knowledge-based systems for data management, selection, integration and display. This paper reviews the developments in these areas and assesses the potential impact of advanced information technology in the IGIS field.

For express control of urban areas environmental conditions it is suggested to apply eco-stable and eco-destructive criteria that can be outlined owing to interpretation of multiband and hyperspectral space-born data. These basic criteria include recreation, residential, industrial, and mining areas, transportation infrastructure, dumps, agricultural fields, etc., and indices related to geological setting, physiographic conditions, and relief-forming factors. As a result of their integrated analysis the rating of urban area environmental conditions can be defined upon distinctive levels as follows: comfortable, optimal, satisfactory, inadequate, pre-crisis and emergency ones. Such an approach is scrutinized as an expert express control for environmental conditions of urbanized territories as a part of geo-ecological audit.

Singularity theory is an efficient way to quantify spatial variations of physical/chemical properties caused by geological processes. This study demonstrates several applications of singularity-based geo-information extraction. Choosing hydrothermal mineralization in Gejiu mineral district, China as an example, different singularity index estimation methods are employed to analyze controlling factors of the mineralization. At the end, this study introduces a fault-oriented singularity index estimation method. In comparison with the original singularity index, the new singularity index estimation method is able to describe anisotropy of geochemical/geophysical properties; meanwhile, controlling effects of fault activities on the hydrothermal mineralization can be quantified accordingly.

The aim of this paper is to develop a conceptual framework for studying the use of geo-information and associated technology in government. We first review how geo-information, geo-information technology and people—notions central to geo-information use—are conceptualized in the literature and show that authors view these notions through two contrasting lenses, a market and a polis lens. We then present a people-centered conceptual framework for the study of geo-information use in government. The framework encompasses people’s values, people’s practices and the rules that people are expected to follow to optimize the use of geo-information. We show how the market and polis lenses illuminate the study of values, practices and rules in different ways resulting in radically different insights. Finally, we illustrate the usefulness of the conceptual framework with preliminary findings from a longitudinal empirical study in the Netherlands.