AUTOMATING MAPPING PRODUCTION FOR THE ENTERPRISE: FROM CONTRACT TO DELIVERY

Abstract. The ever increasing volume and quality of geospatial data has created new challenges for mapping companies. Due to increased image resolution, fusion of different data sources and more frequent data update requirements, mapping production is forced to streamline the work flow to meet client deadlines. But the data volume alone is not the only barrier for an efficient production work flow. Processing geospatial information traditionally uses domain and vendor specific applications that do not interface with each other, often leading to data duplication and therefore creating sources for error. Also, it creates isolation between different departments within a mapping company resulting in additional communication barriers.

North West Geomatics has designed and implemented a data centric enterprise solution for the flight acquisition and production work flow to combat the above challenges. A central data repository containing not only geospatial data in the strictest sense such as images, vector layers and 3D point clouds, but also other information such as product specifications, client requirements, flight acquisition data, production resource usage and much more has been deployed at the company. As there is only one instance of the database shared throughout the whole organization it allows all employees, given they have been granted the appropriate permission, to view the current status of any project with a graphical and table based interface through its life cycle from sales, through flight acquisition, production and product delivery. Not only can users track progress and status of various work flow steps, but the system also allows users and applications to actively schedule or start specific production steps such as data ingestion and triangulation with many other steps (orthorectification, mosaicing, accounting, etc.) in the planning stages. While the complete system is exposed to the users through a web interface and therefore allowing outside customers to also view their data, much of the design and development was focused on work flow automation, scalability and security. Ideally, users will interact with the system to retrieve a specific project status and summaries while the work flow processes are triggered automatically by modeling their dependencies. The enterprise system is built using open source technologies (PostGIS, Hibernate, OpenLayers, GWT and others) and adheres to OGC web services for data delivery (WMS/WFS/WCS) to third party applications.