Railers 2011

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GIS boosts private industry. Firooza Pavri, Special to the BDN, Posted Dec. 30, 2011, at 3:25 p.m. Geospatial technologies will affect our future What we now consider routine applications, such as Internet maps to find street addresses or Global Positioning Systems to navigate street networks, involve the use of complex and interlinked theories, concepts and technologies related to geography, mapping, aerial and satellite imaging, surveying and database design. These coalesce within a GIS, which provides us the ability to capture, store, edit, analyze and display data with a spatial or geographic component. GIS and geospatial technologies are used routinely in fields as diverse as business and marketing, emergency management, environmental planning, geo-intelligence and security, risk assessment, urban planning and utilities management, to name just a few. Studies suggest that industries such as telecommunications, utilities, transportation, education and scientific research constitute some of the largest consumers of this technology, and there is great capacity for growth. The value of GIS is realized through its application in numerous daily tasks. Logistics companies use it to plan optimal delivery routes, the insurance industry assesses risk and vulnerability with geospatial data, the retail sector understands its customer base to provide more efficient services, while in the communications realm, locationspecific applications such as Foursquare, Microsoft GeoLife and Google Buzz on cell phones or social media websites help diffuse this technology to the general public. Future growth in the geospatial technologies industry will depend on a number of factors. These include building capacity and developing broad citizen access to the technology, constructing innovative value-added applications to help businesses make informed decisions, gathering and sharing reliable geospatial data, and training a capable work force. Moreover, the Internet and advances in information and communications technologies undoubtedly also will play a significant role in its expansion.

GIS unique mapping technologies allow for new and more effective methods of ocean exploration. ESRI, December 2007, GIS for Ocean Exploration The influence of human activity, including the damaging effect of anchors, trawling, the use of explosives for fishing, and large amounts of runoff and coastal pollution, has measurable negative effects. Knowledge of the location and extent of critical habitat allows researchers and managers to track more accurately the effects of fishing and, thus, more effectively protect essential areas. This knowledge is crucial to the protection of reef-type habitats and the practice of sustainable fish harvesting. But how is critical habitat determined? And once the assessment has been made that a marine habitat supports enough biodiversity to be considered critical, how can the seafloor be mapped using GIS? Many studies have tackled the question: What makes a seafloor livable? One of these studies from the work of Jeff Ardron of the Living Oceans Society, Sointula, British Columbia, Canada, shows that the physical complexity of the seafloor is a determining factor. A complex seafloor rich with features that contribute to the terrain is more likely to harbor life-forms of all shapes and sizes. These heterogeneous habitats that support multiple life-forms are often associated with species richness. The slope of the terrain; its relief; and, most important, its complexity are all contributing factors to measuring the likelihood of multiple species habitation. Raster calculation tools in the ArcGIS Spatial Analyst extension in conjunction with ArcInfo are used to perform analysis on ecological distribution, and the resulting layers are new information derived from the data of the original bathymetry. The bathymetric layer in GIS usually starts as a large set of points. These points are collected most often using multibeam echo soundings or side-scan sonar devices. To the marine GIS user, the resulting data generated by soundings is simply a set of x,y,z coordinates, and rather simple ones at that, because they only have one associated z value for each x,y and usually occur at one instance in time. From the table of x,y,z values, a set of points can be created; with this set of points, the interpolation begins. With databases now storing tens of millions of points from echo sounding surveys, the challenge begins with the need for mass point data storage, a rapid update of newly surveyed points, and the visual display and representation of the surface created from the points. The points are usually a dense set of dispersed known values. The interpolation tools that can be found in the ArcGIS Spatial

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2/2 User Analyst extension give the user the ability to predict values that are then assigned to all other locations on a cell-bycell basis. Input points can be either randomly or regularly spaced or based on some sampling scheme; in the case of echo sounding data, it is most often a track line created by the sounding device, or fish.

GIS systems and data are more sophisticated and can be analyzed in various ways. Solves for inadequate ground data systems. ESRI, December 2007, GIS for Ocean Exploration GIS organizes geographic data so that a person reading a map can select data necessary for a specific project or task. A thematic map has a table of contents that allows the reader to add layers of information to a basemap of real-world locations. For example, a social analyst might use the basemap of Eugene, Oregon, and select datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau to add data layers to a map that shows residents' education levels, ages, and employment status. With an ability to combine a variety of datasets in an infinite number of ways, GIS is a useful tool for nearly every field of knowledge from archaeology to zoology. A good GIS program is able to process geographic data from a variety of sources and integrate it into a map project. Many countries have an abundance of geographic data for analysis, and governments often make GIS datasets publicly available. Map file databases often come included with GIS packages; others can be obtained from both commercial vendors and government agencies. Some data is gathered in the fi eld by global positioning units that attach a location coordinate (latitude and longitude) to a feature such as a pump station. GIS maps are interactive. On the computer screen, map users can scan a GIS map in any direction, zoom in or out, and change the nature of the information contained in the map. They can choose whether to see the roads, how many roads to see, and how roads should be depicted. Then they can select what other items they wish to view alongside these roads such as storm drains, gas lines, rare plants, or hospitals. Some GIS programs are designed to perform sophisticated calculations for tracking storms or predicting erosion patterns. GIS applications can be embedded into common activities such as verifying an address.

GIS is 99% cheaper than the current map production and WILL be completed on time.
THE COST ANALYSIS OF SATELLITE IMAGES FOR USING IN GIS By the Pert T. Cay a, F. Iscan a, S.S. Durduran. March 20, 2004. Satellite images have quite importance in choosing the most suitable data collecting which answers the

expectations of accuracy speed, cost, time to establish every kind of GIS. PERT is useful because it provides the following information: Expected project completion time. Probability of completion before a specified date. The critical path activities that directly impact the completion time. The activities that have slack time and that can lend resources to critical path activities. Activity start and end dates. According to the PERT method, map production cost of IKONOS Satellite Images is 310 731 $ and calculating durations is 70 days. Same project cost is 29 932 000 $ and duration 10 mounts with 10 geodetic groups. Therefore, by the use of satellite image 99 percent cheaper than classical map production method and 77% in the time can be saved. Hectare cost of the maps we have obtained from satellite images varies according to the dimension of the area. The cost of 1 hectare for the area of 10 km to 10 km is 4.38 $. The cost of 1 hectare for the area of 5 km to 5 km is 12.78 $. Therefore the area of 40 km to 50 km, the onehectare cost can be found much lower (1 he= 1.55 $), due to the optimum size of satellite image. The completion probability of the project with in the required period has been calculated as 97%. It was recognized that the use of satellite image is more economical in terms of cost and time rather than the use of classical process. When the time is considerate, cost and accuracy criteria rectificated satellite images have important advances for most of GIS applications.