information is not easily retrieved, carefully preserved
and secured for use by the intended audience only.
A major driver in the geospatial digital asset
management market place is the growth of so-called
location enabled solutions, i.e. the use of geospatial
information in industries where there is no
fundamental geographical content. An example would
be the insurance industry where location, including
imagery of the surroundings, may be used to identify
risk exposures.
Imagery Data
PEN
International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
Geospatial Library Management Solution
The satellite collection capability has in many ways
outstripped the ability to handle the data effectively on
the ground. Tools to convert imagery to information
play a crucial role in the commercial marketplace.
Equally important is the ability to store and distribute
the data and the products in a timely manner. Digital
asset management systems are crucial to handling the
petabytes of data and associated information products.
These systems provide integrated solutions for the
cataloging, storage, distribution and preservation of
original imagery and products.
Image Products,
Reports, Documents
Digital Asset Management
Ingest Discoverv
and and
Profiling Retrieval
Dissemination
Processing
and
Client Analysis, Exploitation,
and Derived Product Generation
Figure | — Illustrating the functionality of a G-DAM - Geospatial Digital Asset Management System
The era of widely available high resolution remotely
sensed data has arrived. With the advent of numerous
commercial satellite systems, data sets of a quality and
size previously restricted to government use are now
readily available to a broad range of customers. But
the data is only the beginning; the continued growth
and health of the remote sensing industry and related
geospatial enterprises depend on broad adoption of
this technology. To achieve widespread adoption of
remotely sensed imagery, systems 1o derive
information from the imagery are essential. Equally
important is the ability to store and retrieve both data
and derived information. Utility of the high resolution
data must be apparent to a broad community ranging
from map makers to agricultural analysts to
intelligence staff. A farmer wants information on how
to fertilize his fields delivered to him in a timely
manner; he does not want reams of imagery on his
floor. First responders, in a crisis, likewise require
near real time access to route data and do not need
pixels on their patrol car floors. Figure 1 illustrates G-
DAM functionality for a general system which may be
customized for any of the applications mentioned here.
1168
Data utility depends critically on intelligent,
useable systems for data storage, management, and
exploitation. Digital asset management systems for
storing and maintaining high resolution imagery
data must be capable of integration with
exploitation tools, GIS layers and other metadata
in order to move beyond GIS to spatial decision
support systems.
Geospatial digital asset management systems must
meet the challenges of archiving, retrieval, distribution
and analysis of geospatial imagery and associated
reports. In the words of an engineer in the G-DAM
development business, the objective of a G-DAM is to
“accelerate the geospatial information processing
chain through advanced automation techniques” In
this paper we present a highly modular and scaleable
geospatial digital asset management System.
Scaleability is essential as typical geospatial
enterprises will have rapidly growing Storage
requirements. For example, à satellite receiving station
may receive dozens of multi-megabyte images per
day. This system is an image-based geospatial data
management system which addresses issues crucial to
the user including efficient data ingest and retrieval,
. Vol XXXV, Part B4. Istanbul 2004
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