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From CAD User AEC Magazine  Vol 22 No 5 - MAY/JUNE 2009

Intermap takes Elevation Data to new heights with NEXTMap Europe

Atool that civil engineers in the U.K. have been using since 2003 has now been made available to their colleagues on the Continent. Intermap Technologies placed its NEXTMap Europe map database on the shelf in May, offering digital elevation models (DEMs) / height data to 1 metre vertical accuracy, orthorectified radar images (ORIs), and optimized TIN models (OTMs) for all of Western Europe. The database, comprising 2.4 million km2, extends from the eastern border of the Czech Republic westward to County Kerry, Ireland, and from the Shetland Islands to the southernmost point of Spain. For engineers, NEXTMap Europe DEMs and ORIs have made the evaluation of topography, land use, and land cover more reliable as well as cost efficient. NEXTMap Europe's specific engineering applications range far and wide:

• designing highways and railways accurately
• providing reliable site-location information based on how the soil and rocks underneath a proposed structure will respond under pressure
• assessing potential risks of environmental hazards such as floods and mudslides
• determining the optimum routes for municipal water supplies or sites for wastewater treatment systems
• providing accurate line-of-sight, slope, aspect, and viewshed analyses NEXTMap Europe represents the largest commercially available database of its kind: all of Western Europe to 1-metre vertical accuracy and a horizontal accuracy of 2 metres. The coverage includes 80 billion elevation measurements and 1.3 trillion image pixels.

NEXTMap Britain - which was itself an enormously ambitious and unprecedented effort at the time - was the predecessor to the NEXTMap Europe programme. Intermap commenced collecting highly accurate elevatiti data for Great Britain in January 2002. Comprising 202,000 km2 of digital elevation models (DEMs) and orthorectified radar images (ORIs) for England, Wales and Scotland, NEXTMap Britain's countrywide elevation datasets enable an incredibly diverse range of applications in private and government enterprise.

NEXTMap Britain was completed in October 2003 and represented the first time a commercial organisation, rather than a government entity, had attempted the collection and processing of countrywide elevation data to 1m vertical accuracy. Intermap collects the data with its proprietary interferometric synthetic aperture radar (IFSAR) technology, mounted on aircraft that fly up to 720 kilometres per hour at an altitude of 34,000 feet.

The accuracy and uniformity of the NEXTMap Britain datasets soon proved their applicability in a number of markets, from engineering planning to flight simulation and 3D visualisation. For example, the original NEXTMap Britain dataset contributed to Norwich Union Insurance's accurate flood risk models, as well as Microsoft's Virtual Earth 3D viewing platform in Great Britain. The Environment Agency and Getmapping - which used the datasets in its development of the Millennium Map - were also early licensees of NEXTMap Britain data.

In addition, Cambridgeshire County Council used NEXTMap Britain data to generate a complete terrain map of the county, allowing county authorities to retrieve data on landscape and archaeological studies - including housing developments, gravel extraction, and proposed road and pipeline designs.

BUILDING ON THE SUCCESS OF NEXTMAP BRITAIN However, as significant as the completion of NEXTMap Britain was, it proved to be a stepping stone to something much larger: the expansion of the NEXTMap business model well beyond Britain's borders. One of the biggest attributes of the idea behind NEXTMap, its countrywide uniformity, led Intermap to extend the programme to the United States as well as Western Europe.

"The completion of NEXTMap Europe enables additional cross-border applications and collaboration across the region - a collaboration that was nearly impossible prior to this initiative," said Brian Bullock, Intermap president and chief executive officer. The uniformity of NEXTMap Europe - the specifications and

accuracy are the same throughout Western Europe - corresponds with various initiatives throughout the European community to mandate governments' usage of standardized datasets.

In June 2006, an Intermap Lear jet took off from a German airport to collect the initial data for NEXTMap Europe; the final flight took place in the skies over the Italian Alps in July 2008. A total of 153 terabytes of raw radar was collected and later processed into 600 gigabytes of unedited DSMs and 2.3 terabytes of ORIs.

At one point, four aircraft were deployed in different countries around the world, collecting data for its NEXTMap programmes in Europe, the United States, and Asia. The collection of elevation data for Germany (357,000 km2) in 2006 saw a seven-fold increase in operational efficiencies compared to the NEXTMap Britain programme in 2001, but Intermap continued to develop processes that improved the efficiencies even further.

By May 2007, Intermap had implemented a method of automatically recalibrating the onboard radar antennae that increased the percentage of flight time that the radar was online from 50 percent to 80 percent resulting in a dramatic increase in data collection rates.

As the datasets for countries were processed, they were placed on the shelf to immediately begin enabling engineering and other projects. Germany was the first country completed under the NEXTMap Europe programme, becoming available in September 2007. Since then, a number

of private and public organisations throughout Western Europe have licensed NEXTMap Europe data:

• GEOinfo, the organisation responsible for the acquisition, generation, and dissemination of geodata in Lower Austria, acquired NEXTMap Europe Austria data to assist with the georectification of orthophotos and the planning of a large construction project for the refurbishment of Vienna International Airport
• The E-Plus Group, a German wireless network provider, is using the NEXTMAP Europe - Germany dataset as well as portions of countries surrounding Germany to plan infrastructure for its telecommunications network.
• France's national mapping agency, Institut Geographique National, acquired NEXTMap Europe - France data to upgrade that nation's geospatial database, using it for transportation route planning, noise reduction, aviation safety, environmental applications and more.

Collection of data for NEXTMap USA, which includes 8 million km2 of coverage for the contiguous United States and Hawaii, began in October 2003 and was completed in March 2009; the complete database will be available early in 2010.

www.intermap.com

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