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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