Ukraine achieves long awaited step forward in NSDI development

“2020 can be considered as the year of geospatial data in Ukraine with the Ukrainian geospatial community facing a historic moment of digitalisation. We have introduced a ‘single window’ for natural resource management, which will help to save budget funds and develop territories, strengthen public control over the activities of state bodies and increase public confidence in the government.”

In April 2020, Ukraine’s law on the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) was finally adopted by the Ukrainian Parliament after more than 10 years and 4 attempts. Although Ukraine is not an EU Member State, the law is fully in line with INSPIRE and also reflects the main principles of EU open data policy.

The Council on National Spatial Data Infrastructure has been established to provide the advisory support on NSDI implementation, which is of critical national importance. Together with the Research Institute for Geodesy and Cartography, StateGeoCadastre has developed the portal for the NSDI pilot project. This provides online integration of national, regional and local level geospatial datasets from 5 cities, 2 oblast administrative areas and 75 amalgamated territorial communities which can be accessed by the public.

Benefits

• Gradual full digitisation of all processes and data in Ukraine.
• Maintenance of a single topographic base.
• Avoids duplication of financial and human resources for similar work, reducing budget costs at national, regional and local levels.
• Provides a complete electronic picture of Ukraine in one place.
• Ensures effective public administration and public control.
• Deregulation of existing procedures, disclosure of information and creation of added value.
• Stimulates the investment climate through the  integration of all geospatial data in the one single, user-friendly portal.
• Enables integration of Ukraine to the European and Global Spatial Data Infrastructure.

Using trusted data as the foundation of underground asset registers

“Ordnance Survey was delighted to be a partner in this unique and ambitious project. The Geospatial Commission’s NUAR pilots have clearly demonstrated the value of bringing together multi-stakeholder data into a single register through which data can be shared and exchanged – delivering an immediate reduction in risk and a broader increase to efficiency. The importance of trusted geospatial data being at the foundation of the initiative has been widely recognised and builds on decades of valuable collaboration with the utility sector.”

David Henderson, Chief Geospatial Officer, Ordnance Survey

Together with the Geospatial Commission and the Greater London Authority, Ordnance Survey developed a communal register prototype integrating different types of underground asset data owned by utility companies. As UK utility providers are private companies, often in competition with each other and reluctant to share data, this will help them to operate more efficiently, reduce accidents, such as strikes on underground pipes and cables, and ultimately make data-sharing across organisations less challenging.

The UK’s Geospatial Commission, responsible for national geospatial strategy, invested in two pilot projects aiming to evaluate the feasibility and value of a National Underground Asset Register (NUAR) in enabling better data-sharing of trusted information across the utilities sector.

Ordnance Survey led the delivery of a pilot project across national and regional utility providers and local authorities in North East England. This included the design, development and configuration of a data sharing prototype, enabling stakeholders to view a comprehensive integrated map of underground assets and associated data. The technical solution provided a single, high-quality, accessible view of this trusted information, and complied with data sharing principles, ensuring the legal and technical security of data owners’ contributions. A bespoke data model was created to ensure interoperability.

The aim is to show underground assets from all relevant utility providers in a single area in relationship to the detailed national OS MasterMap, in an accessible solution that is easy for onsite excavation teams and construction workers to access on mobile phones, tablets and toughbook computers.

Benefits

• A data sharing platform on which all relevant parties share trusted underground data will reap significant operational and health and safety benefits in utilities, construction, local government and for citizens, including improved accuracy, usability and evidence-based decision-making.
• The Geospatial Commission estimated a £1.2 billion economic cost per year from accidental strikes on underground pipes and cables. This platform will help support the avoidance of future utility strikes and subsequent inconvenience caused to the public.
• Early trials have already identified where efficiency savings and safe working practices can be enhanced in back-end planning and operational response. A major utility provider commented ‘as a high-level estimate that they could save £1 million annually just on streamlining the planning process for obtaining utility plans’.
• In the future, NUAR will enable engineers to see what assets are underground which means less trial holes being dug, decreasing the margin for error and subsequent costs. NUAR would also contain additional utility assets and a user can widen the search area; this will assist the tracking of a leak and identify any potential escape routes – e.g. water flowing through a telecommunication duct before surfacing.
• Incident responders have highlighted increased confidence levels in putting safety first for their excavator teams, as they receive an instant integrated and reliable map view of all critical utility assets.

Kadaster provides policy-makers with vital information for energy transition

“The transitional change to a sustainable energy system is perhaps the most challenging policy goal of our time. It requires not only an industrial approach, but also a major effort of innovation in all related fields of expertise. In the past year, we have seen how geodata can contribute to an effective planning and concrete measures in the case of solar energy potential in the built-environment. In combination with administrative data, this provides the required realistic insights the policy makers need. With state of the art deep learning techniques, we are now able to update and monitor the transition related to the policy goals and projects where unused potential can be found. This is a telling example of how geodata is rapidly becoming an important factor in an effective approach to the greater obligations we are facing.”

Frank Tierolff, Chair Executive Board Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency The Netherlands

The Netherlands Cadastre, Land Registry and Mapping Agency (Kadaster) created a database of information related to solar potential, (available space on roof tops including detecting existing solar PV installations) which is very useful for the Regional Energy Strategy (RES) regions to reach their targets related to the Climate Agreement.

High resolution elevation data was used to create solar potential models and deep learning techniques were employed to detect existing solar panels from very high resolution aerial images for the whole of the Netherlands. Data pre-processing and post-processing were customised to achieve automation, high accuracies in the results and to be able to match them with building information. This is a good example of GeoAI, where the best of both the worlds is combined to help tackle large geographic datasets for energy transition.

Benefits

• Helps policy-makers to speed up the energy transition by providing? information on where and how much space is available to generate solar energy. At the same time, the data is easy to understand and visualise.
• Provides an insight on not only where the potential lies, but also categorises it by building and owner type, which is much more useful to the policy-makers.
• Provides information on locations of currently installed solar PV with high quality. This is especially useful to update the Production Installation Register which is largely, but not entirely complete, for small installations in homes and businesses.
• Deep learning algorithms enable fast and fairly easy updating of the solar installation database at regular intervals for the entire country.
• Presents a realistic insight on solar potential of building rooftops which is useful in urban planning applications.
• Many more possibilities are opened up by the development and testing of the solar potential models for rooftops, for example calculating solar potential for parking lots where solar panels could be placed on carports or on building facades.

Helping pupils to develop real-life skills by putting map-making into practice

“swisstopo promotes the use of federal digital maps in the classroom, as well as knowledge of geoinformation and official Swiss maps across all school levels.”

Dr. Fridolin Wicki, Director, Federal Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport, Federal Office of Topography swisstopo

Switzerland’s sCHoolmap platform has been developed by swisstopo and other federal offices to help pupils develop their map-related skills.

sCHoolmap is accessed via geo.admin.ch and provides a broad range of teaching ideas and examples for working with the map viewer for almost every school year. The basis for working with these digital (school) maps is the official federal map viewer, map.geo.admin.ch which enables easy access to a broad range of map topics from different federal sources, covering all subjects taught in primary school. Functionwise, pupils can interact with maps , e.g. calculate height differences and walking distances, and annotate  maps using the ‘draw’ function. Historical maps and aerial imagery are among the most used topics in school. Half [1] of all Swiss teachers now use sCHoolmap, which is accessed free of charge and without the need to register.

Benefits

• Makes mapping fun and working with geodata attractive for the next generation.
• Enables pupils from year 4 onwards to develop their map-related skills by learning how to work with official online maps.
• Brings a wide range of map-related activities to life with practical examples, including planning for school outings, working out the best route to school, tracing the location of old town walls, or even organising an ‘orienteering challenge selfie’.
• Supports teachers in finding clever ideas for interdisciplinary education and developing and implementing their own themes and ideas.
• Provides an insight into the past with an integrated virtual time travel function showing what the location of their home or school building looked like a hundred years ago, as well as geological changes such as glacier retreat.
• Supports Syllabus 21 by promoting an understanding of the correlations between economic, ecological and social processes using geography as a common link.

Promoting trust in the accuarcy of authoritative data

“Cadastral plans are an important element of land administration in most countries, including Slovenia, but we often take them for granted. Cadastral plans are integral to the procedures used in the recording and management of real estate, rearrangement and division of land, land improvement, real estate valuation, land taxation, and as tools for the rational management of land and buildings.”

Tomaž Petek, Director-General, Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic of Slovenia

A project to improve positional accuracy of the cadastral index map (ZKP) is delivering uniform topologically correct data used for land adminstration in Slovenia.

The Surveying and Mapping Authority is using the latest technology and methods to update the data, which was first collected in the first half of the 19th Century, to maxmise its use in of spatial planning, building construction and real estate management.

The ZKP remains unchanged but the land cadastre plan (ZKN) was supplemented/amended with land cover points, which received eastern and northern coordinates in the improvement and thus became a uniform graphical layer. All the activities are presented and described in Slovenian Land on Cadastral Maps.

Benefits

• Meets the needs of users through continuous and improved positional accuracy.
• Ensures the first production of the ZKN as a uniform graphical layer for the whole of Slovenia.
• Provides a better understanding of the history of the changes to data.
• Mathematical-statistical analyses, facilitated by the method used, provide an effective tool for detecting gross errors in observations in the land cadastre database.
• Benefits a wide range of uses in implementating land administration tasks such as: the production of municipal spatial planning plans; the regulation of conditions for protected farms; the granting of agricultural subsidies; the calculation of forest road fees; the implementation of new spatial planning and building legislation; the regulation of rights to social transfers; and the formulation of tax policies.
• Demonstrates the contribution of the State Surveying and Mapping Authority, as well as of the surveying profession as a whole, to modern society.

Scotland uses long-established expertise to create a modern mapping platform for the future

“Mapping underpins everything we do and everything we aspire to as we look to the future and a data-driven Land Register. To become a reality, Registers of Scotland (RoS) needed the right tools to enable our plans team to capture mapping extents as data and not pictures. Our 5-year plan has now delivered on that vision and is being rolled out into the business.”

Kenny Crawford, Business Development Director, Registers of Scotland (RoS)

Registers of Scotland (RoS) is building a modern mapping platform to enable it to work with structured data, develop new strategies to deliver information from the Land Register, adapt to improvements in geospatial and location technology and quickly answer questions such as ‘Who owns Scotland?' 

The Cadastral Map is the product RoS is building to bring to life a spatial data infrastructure and web-based tools to support the Scottish Land Registration process. 

Delivering these improvements requires the migration of 1.9 million registered titles and their 10 million individual data entities into a new data structure defining Scotland's land register and cadastral map for the next 400 years. 

RoS’s technological development incorporates open standards, utilises open-source software and is influenced by developing innovative approaches to service and product design and is underpinned by our adoption of the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM ISO19152).

Benefits

• Improved transparency and accessibility of mapping data.
• Simplified and improved journeys for registration service journeys.
• Mapping tooling and data is at the heart of both its staff and customer experience. Its flagship citizen portal, ScotLIS, is underpinned by mapping.
• Supports its commitment to the UK and Scottish government agenda of open data.
• Its mapping products are designed to enable the cartographic function of RoS to be performed in a more efficient way and accessible to staff who are neither experts in registration or have a mapping background.
• By taking a data-first strategy, RoS has developed new systems built on the foundations of the historical Sasine register, namely openness and transparency.
• Enables diversification so RoS learns more and discovers new ways to use land and property information and respond better to  customers’ needs.

Supporting Romania’s digital transformation

“Our motto, not only for this period, but also for the future is: no papers, no cash, no counter! By means of a constant dialogue with our partners and following a carefully developed strategy, we continued the process of shaping/transformation of our business into a modern one, bringing on the market digital services and products essential for this period.”

Laurențiu Alexandru Blaga, Director General, National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration of Romania

Digitisation is enabling the National Agency for Cadastre and Land Registration of Romania to manage the challenges of Covid-19, whilst also strengthening its services for the future.

As a result of the unprecedented impact of the pandemic, the Agency has accelerated its digital transformation. By adopting new technologies, both basic applications and IT systems have been enhanced and services have been streamlined. The Agency believes that digitisation is a ‘safety belt’ solution that not only enables it to work in safety but is also an opportunity to make its operations stronger.  

Benefits

• Enables agency partners (licensed surveyors, notaries public, bailiffs, judicial experts) to work 100% online.
• Allows online e-signatures using a qualified certificate.
• Enables card payments for agency services.
• Reduces bureaucracy.
• Responds to and meets customer needs.
• Contributes to and supports the digital transformation of Romania.

Revealing new insights about the Portuguese landscape

“As the National Reference Center for Land Cover, we have been producing the flagship land use and land cover map of Portugal based on visual interpretation of orthophotos. Whilst these maps are widely appreciated and used by the public and private sectors, we are also pioneering new methods of map production as a response to the ever-growing need for information on land cover. Based on Sentinel-2 images and automatic methodologies, we are starting a new annual series of land cover maps which we hope will also become a milestone in terms of innovation and quality in the coming years.”

Fernanda do Carmo, General Director, Directorate General for Territory, Portugal

The Directorate General for Territory has started production of an annual land cover map series of Portugal based on satellite imagery.

A new land cover map for mainland Portugal – COSsim – was produced using Sentinel-2 data automatic classification. Using the reference year of 2018, it depicts the Portuguese landscape in raster format at high spatial resolution with the aim of initiating a series of maps that will be updated every year.

The new map builds on the supervised classification of Sentinel-2 data with machine learning classifiers and the automatic extraction of training data from auxiliary datasets, such as official crop records and Copernicus High Resolution Layers. The supervised classification is refined by integrating expert-knowledge rules related to species distributions, agricultural practices, vegetation recovery after wildfires and so on.

The methods deployed form an end-to-end and reproducible semi-automatic workflow based on open source software for providing reliable and transparent new information to society.

Benefits

• Reveals new insights about the Portuguese landscape that emerge from the high spatial resolution.
• Provides relevant information for public and private stakeholders that need fine spatial data, such as decision-makers, researchers, and entrepreneurs.
• Offers opportunities for monitoring the territory over time.
• Already adopted in real applications on wildfire spread modeling and spatial planning.
• Meets the ever-growing need for information about land use and land cover.

Putting open data on the map to stimulate economic growth in Poland

“We provide data from the Central Geodetic and Cartographic Resource free of charge and without any restrictions. Data release stimulates economic growth by creating new jobs and encouraging investment in industry and business.”

Waldemar Izdebski, Surveyor General of Poland, Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography

Significant changes, including the launch of new open data, were acheived as a result of the amendment of the Polish Geodetic and Cartographic Law.

Data from the Central Geodetic and Cartographic Resource is now freely available for download from www.geoportal.gov.pl. Open datasets include topographic data (BDOT10k), orthoimagery, digital elevation model (DEM), laser scanning (LiDAR), digital terrain model (DTM), geodetic control networks data, basic data on parcels and buildings. Users can download any required data, without any limitations. The opening of spatial data improves data availability for citizens and boosts the development of businesses using authoritative spatial data. By shortening the time needed to update data in the land and buildings registers, the amendment also helps to faster implementation of the investment project.

Benefits

• Significantly improves geodetic and cartographic activities and allows wide access to spatial data.
• Eliminates bureaucracy in geodetic activities such as licence applications and supplementary declarations.
• Improves the data update process in the land and buildings registers.
• Reduces time needed to complete procedures related to geodetic works, enabling earlier completion of the investment project.
• Significantly increases use of geoportal.gov.pl website, which had 5.46 million users in 2020 –  38% more compared to 2019. The website is ranked 3rd most visited government portals.
• Achieved record use of the integrated service KIEG, which provides cadastral data (cadastral parcels and buildings) – in 2020 there were 2.14 billion calls, an increase of more than 40% compared to 2019.
• The geoportal.gov.pl service provides a LIDAR point cloud viewer.
• More than 320 TB data have been downloaded since the spatial data was released. Instructions for downloading data can be found on the Head Office Geodesy and Cartography YouTube channel. It is possible to easily download this data via WMS service through geoportal.gov.pl

Supporting effective national emergency planning, response and recovery in Northern Ireland

“I am delighted that OSNI has been able to assist Northern Ireland’s emergency preparedness group through the provision of its data and expert GI services. This has been made possible by the combination of the Northern Ireland Mapping Agreement and Spatial NI, OSNI’s integrated mapping platform. It has been encouraging to see the innovative and strategic use of spatial data underpinning the work of emergency planners and responders in the current global crisis.”

Jim Lennon, Chief Survey Officer, Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland

The Emergency Preparedness Group for Northern Ireland (EPGNI) leverages Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland (OSNI) data and services through the Northern Ireland Mapping Agreement (NIMA) to develop and support an integrated spatial data infrastructure for effective national emergency planning, response and recovery.

Emergency planning is at the core of multiple public sector organisations in Northern Ireland (NI), each with a specific role and remit and working together through the EPGNI to deliver a coordinated national response to emergency events. In times of crisis, such as the ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic, access to authoritative spatial information is fundamental to situational awareness and effective decision making. By leveraging NIMA, EPGNI members are able to fully utilise OSNI’s mapping data, draw on the expert services of OSNI’s GI specialists, and harness the technology of Spatial NI – OSNI’s web-based spatial data infrastructure – to ensure an integrated and holistic approach to emergency planning, response and recovery in NI.

Benefits

• OSNI’s GI specialists advise on and work with EPGNI member organisations on best practices for data collection and management to facilitate accuracy and suitability of information.
• In collaboration with EPGNI staff, OSNI’s GI specialists develop bespoke spatial datasets to augment and enhance existing information streams.
• OSNI’s GI specialists advise on and support the development of data sharing and dissemination processes within EPGNI organisations so information is disseminated and accessible to appropriate stakeholders, including the public, when needed.
• All EPGNI member organisations and their staff leverage OSNI’s mapping data products and, because of NIMA, the data is free at the point of use thereby reducing barriers to data access.
• OSNI’s Spatial NI platform collects and shares necessary datasets to EPGNI members on demand and in an easily digestible format, facilitating better understanding and use by staff with varying levels of technical expertise.
• Aggregating and disseminating authoritative datasets through Spatial NI, an integrated mapping platform with mapping and analytical functionality, informs situational awareness and supports effective decision making by emergency planners and responders.