International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XXXIX-B4, 2012 
XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia 
human resources to perform work flow steps that cannot be easily 
automated by machines such as visual quality control. 
In the following the paper we will outline the stakeholders in a 
mapping production environment, describe various work flow 
steps in production, discuss the design and implementation of an 
enterprise catalogue at NWG and finally list the experiences the 
stakeholders had over the last year. While the enterprise catalogue 
discussed in this paper is a unique development and tailored 
specifically for NWG's needs and requirements, many of the 
challenges that were addressed can be found at other mapping 
companies. 
STAKEHOLDERS 
Throughout the life cycle of a mapping project there are various 
groups, or stakeholders, that have a vested interest the acquired 
and processed data. The following stakeholders are identified as: 
Planning 
Planning is responsible for the generation of a flight plan 
including spatial extent, flight line layout, distribution of ground 
control points and resource allocation. 
Acquisition 
Flight crews consisting of pilots and sensor operators execute the 
flight plans and are responsible for sending the acquired image 
data to the main office for quality control and processing. 
Quality Control 
Quality control (QC) makes assessments on the quality of imagery 
and metadata throughout the production work flow. While some of 
the QC is automated it is still in large parts a process requiring 
human interaction. The very first QC on incoming flight data is 
time crucial as it may call costly re-flights due to environmental 
impact such as clouds or strong turbulence and due to technical 
failures while the flight crew is still on site. Various software 
packages, especially for viewing and measuring, are utilized. 
Production 
Production generates deliverable image products such as ortho 
images, stereo viewable images, 3D point clouds and other 
derived products. The production group is also responsible for all 
intermediate processing steps such as geo-referencing and 
triangulation. The main software package used for creating image 
deliverables is the XPro software suite, although also other 
packages are used for auxiliary tasks. 
Online Delivery 
Provides access to clients and customers to view and downloading 
image products through a web browser and/or ArcGIS. Generic 
WMS/WCS delivery is also possible. 
Accounting 
Accounting is responsible for customer invoicing and tracking 
resource usage. 
Management 
Develops new business opportunities and maintains existing ones, 
Also, management is responsible for project budgeting, project 
life cycle monitoring and resource management. 
The challenge for any large mapping company like ours is how to 
facilitate better communication between these different 
stakeholders and reduce the inefficiency that results from working 
with multiple projects at the same time (status tracking, context 
switching, data handling etc.). 
WORK FLOW 
After having committed to a new contract, management and 
accounting will have done the resource allocation and the project 
goes into the technical planning stage. Here the flight plan is 
created taking all the contract specifications into account. This 
plan is very detailed with all the flight lines laid out for the flight 
crew to follow. At location the flight crew will execute the flight 
plan and send the data, even if only partially flown, back to the 
main office. QC assesses the imagery immediately at reception 
and checks for any type of issue such as clouds, smoke, 
turbulence, sensor failure, etc. Re-flights may then be called based 
on severity of the found issues. Given the cost of maintaining a 
flight crew at the acquisition site the timely detection of re-flights 
is crucial. 
Planning 
Acquisition - m 
  
  
Production “> QC - J 
Delivery 
Figure 1: High level work flow diagram 
Once the acquired imagery passes initial QC production starts on 
the actual processing of the data which involves geo-referencing, 
triangulation, ortho-rectification, mosaicing and generation of 
meta data that accompanies the deliverable imagery. Optional 
products may include stereo viewable image pairs and digital 
surface models. Most of the above processing steps are preceded 
by additional QC steps to ensure geometric and radiometric 
consistency of the final products. Finally, once the final 
deliverable products have met the original specifications the 
imagery is either sent by traditional means, i.e. stored on physical 
mass media storage, or made accessible through the VALTUS web 
store where clients can download the data or stream the imagery 
online into their software package of choice. 
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