KIX-B8, 2012 
is given in table 1. 
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future activities. 
study area 
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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XXXIX-B8, 2012 
XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia 
3.2.2 Data quality assessment and improvement 
Even if some data has been selected for inclusion in the 
database, it is not always of the best possible quality. Within the 
resources allocated to the KAL-Haiti project, we thus strive to 
apply the state-of-the-art data processing methods in order to 1) 
assess the data quality level 2) raise this quality level using the 
best of our know-how, if necessary. This is required by the 
researchers who, most often, are unwilling to bear the burden of 
correcting data of poor quality. Some examples of this 
processing are: denoising, radiometric calibration, reflectance 
computation, geometric accuracy. 
3.2.3 Data interoperability 
In crisis management situations, information is produced with 
different modalities (e.g. optical and SAR imagery) and in 
different formats or reference systems. However none of these 
information sources alone is sufficient to face the complexity of 
the problems posed by the situation. As a consequence, fusion 
of information coming from different sources is necessary, 
provided that these data are interoperable. The KAL-Haiti 
project takes this requirement into account by building data 
whose properties are consistent throughout the whole dataset: 
dating, geo-referencing, ortho-rectification, physical meaning, 
consistent metadata, standard nomenclatures and formats, etc. 
3.2.4 Data accessibility 
One important point for efficient research as well as effective 
support to humanitarian initiatives is the free accessibility to the 
data. This is natural for data whose license grants to everybody 
a free right to use them. But this is a concern for data which are 
normally distributed within a commercial framework because 
there exist no suitable generic license allowing non-commercial 
uses in specific domains and for specific activities. Thus the 
access to these commercial data in the KAL-Haiti database is 
granted only to registered users on a per data basis, allowing the 
traceability of their non-commercial uses. 
3.3 The database 
The datasets produced within the KAL-Haiti project are stored 
into a database which is accessible through Internet (KAL-Haiti 
website). The solution used so far for this implementation is 
based on the KALIDEOS solution, and allows to query the 
database using a small number of criteria (area of interest, data 
type, sensor, etc.) and to retrieve the files containing the data. 
In the second part of the project a solution built on more 
cutting-edge technologies will be designed, allowing the users 
to browse, combine, amend and enrich the datasets online. 
3.4 Applications promotion and follow-up 
Once they have been selected together with the community of 
contributors, new applications are launched by mobilizing 
either project or external resources. The goal is to propose, for 
each problem which has been identified, the best possible 
solution involving end-users with real needs in Haiti and the 
highest-level scientific laboratories. Involvement of Haitian 
teams or institutes is also considered in order to favour spin-off 
on these topics. 
The selected applications are then followed up as usual 
scientific and technical developments, except that their outcome 
(progress, produced data, publications, models, etc) are 
systematically provided to the database. 
19 
4. EXAMPLES OF APPLICATIONS 
In this section three applications which have been conducted 
(first and second ones) or which could be realized (third one) 
are briefly presented. They illustrate the diversity of the needs 
and problems and also the richness of the database results. More 
applications results will be available on the KAL-Haiti website 
as soon as they become available and will be shown during the 
oral presentation. 
4.1 Reconstruction monitoring in urban areas 
Construction and reconstruction of safe houses and buildings 
after such a major disaster as the January,12 2010 earthquake is 
one of the major challenges facing the Haitian nation and the 
international community. Indeed a lot of initiatives have been 
carried out: hard shelters have been installed in many locations, 
destroyed buildings have been removed in most cities, houses 
repairs have been made, and new buildings have been erected. 
Monitoring this rapidly evolving situation is thus very 
important from different perspectives: social services, economy 
planning, health care, to name a few. In order to be effective, 
such a monitoring should cover wide areas in order to account 
for the whole population of the cities and should be updated at 
short intervals for near real-time awareness. Remote sensing 
imagery can thus be very useful for monitoring such evolutions 
in this kind of situation. 
In order to assess the added value of high resolution remote 
sensing imageries for such situation monitoring, the KAL-Haiti 
project has produced a set of vector layers built from satellite 
and aerial imagery, and showing the buildings footprints at 
different periods. Three layers showing the location and status 
of 22 257 buildings over the Jacmel area (50 km?) have been 
produced by photo-interpretation: one from a Worlview-l 
image acquired on Dec. 9, 2009, before the earthquake, a 
second one just after the earthquake from the NOAA aerial 
campaign made on Jan. 24, 2010 and a third one 18 months 
later using a Worldview-2 image acquired on July 17, 2011. 
  
      
Figure 2 - Evolution of buildings and shelters in Jacmel area, at 
3 dates: before, just after and 18 months after the earthquake.