Day: August 17, 2010

Land Monitoring Network Services Based On International Geospatial Standards: SOSI and Geoland2/SDI Projects

/ Matt Artz

International Journal of Digital Earth, Volume 3, Issue S1 April 2010 , pages 70 – 84

Stephan Meissl and Gerhard Triebnig

“Spatial Observation Services and Infrastructure is a project to develop and verify innovative infrastructure and services within the context of land monitoring and Earth Observation initiatives at European and Member State (MS) levels. The project’s results contribute to the concept definition of the Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS) emphasising symmetrical online sharing of information as opposed to unidirectional reporting. In a pre-operational set-up, involving the European Environment Agency (EEA), four MS sites and the European Space Agency (ESA), a decentralised information system respecting the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) principles is demonstrated integrating distributed data and processing services as well as interactive multi-lingual access.

“The geoland2 project is carried out in the context of Global Monitoring for the Environment and Security (GMES), a joint initiative of the European Commission and ESA, aiming to build up a European capacity for GMES. The Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) task shall set up operational services for the discovery, viewing, access and delivery of all products generated in the geoland2 project.

“The paper presents the projects along the five International Standards Organisation (ISO)/Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing viewpoints and concludes with the main recommendation that service provisioning can strongly benefit from a (re-) utilisation of the Service Support Environment (SSE) technology provided sustainably by ESA and from the related rich experience.”

  • More information

European Environment Agency and Esri Put Map Service in Cloud

/ Matt Artz

The European Environment Agency (EEA) and Esri have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU). The agreement supports the design and development of ways to share and access essential geographic environmental data provided by the agency’s 38 European member countries.

EEA, which already uses Esri’s geographic information system (GIS) products, will now work closely with Esri to improve the agency’s cloud environment map services. European countries will share their environmental data more easily, while nations, agencies, scientists, and policy makers will be able to quickly access and consume the data for viewing and analysis.

“Our partnership with Esri provides us with innovative solutions to reach out to our key stakeholders and present them with timely and relevant information as they need it,” said Jacquie McGlade, EEA’s executive director. “The agency will now also be able to work directly with citizens in the coproduction of knowledge via open access to data, creation of personalized maps, and simple ways of sharing data among social networks. The two-way exchange of knowledge and expertise between Esri and the EEA underlines just how business and the public sector can work well together to build answers for tomorrow’s challenges.”

During the next year, EEA and Esri will work together to develop

  • Cloud architecture that serves the EEA initiatives and European Union directives
  • Data sharing that is in line with the principles of Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe (INSPIRE) as well as the Shared Environmental Information System
  • Standardized templates and layer definitions based on the Esri Community Maps initiative
  • A collaborative plan supporting EEA’s Eye on Earth initiative

“EEA is a leader in environmental issues and has a high level of expertise,” said Esri president Jack Dangermond. “This alliance brings together EEA’s environmental knowledge and Esri’s technologies, which will greatly benefit Europe’s environmental community. People will share information via the cloud and use applications that will allow them to analyze and create policy regarding quality of the environment and hazards.”

EEA helps the community and member countries make informed decisions about improving the environment, integrating environmental consideration into economic policies, and moving toward sustainability. It is also charged to coordinate the European Environment Information and Observation Network (Eionet). Esri’s complete ArcGIS system plays a prominent role in helping EEA achieve its goal of delivering geographic data management, visualization, and analysis capabilities to environmental information consumers.

[Source: Esri press release]

Research on the Texture Extraction of QuickBird Image Based on the Geostatistics

/ Matt Artz / 1 Comment

2010 Third International Conference on Information and Computing, vol. 1, pp. 133-136

Wuxi, Jiang Su, China

“The QuickBird phantom was the multi-spectrum resolution has achieved Mi Ji one of commercial satellites, might supply the spectrum information, the structure information and the time information for the user, but in the actual application by the spectrum, the time information were many, the structure information were few, but the structure information’s application increased the remote sensing phantom classified precision. The structure information’s extraction uses in statistics variation function method, when the computation variation function uses the overlaid windows, the size is the 5X5 size, the length of stride is 1. But the QuickBird phantom’s multi-spectra have 4 wave bands, to reduce the data redundancy, before its extraction texture uses the main ingredient transformation, the first host ingredient information content is 67.04%, the second host ingredient is 32.45%, one, two main ingredient sum total is 99.49%, according to the above only withdraws the main ingredient 1, 2 image texture. Is best after the quite absolute deviation function texture.”