Karel Janečka

The Strategy for the Development of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the Czech Republic

Spatial information is often not effectively handled and used, e.g., in public administration. The key reason is that information about what spatial data exists, and where and under which circumstances it can be used, is missing. This leads to a situation whereby data are gathered and maintained multiple times. In October 2014, the Czech government approved the conception of The Strategy for the Development of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the Czech Republic to 2020 (GeoInfoStrategy), which serves as a basis for the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). Furthermore, in June 2015 the GeoInfoStrategy Action Plan was approved. The vision of the GeoInfoStrategy is that the Czech Republic will use spatial information effectively by 2020. The innovative approach of the GeoInfoStrategy to build the NSDI includes cooperation between all parties—not only public administration, but also the private sector, academia, professional associations and user communities. The principles defined in the GeoInfoStrategy are general and can serve as best practice for other countries building an NSDI that should meet the requirements of all target groups working with spatial information.

On how to build SDI using social networking principles in the scope of spatial planning and vocational education

Several ways how to build a spatial data infrastructure usable for spatial planning domain exist. It must be said that today the area of spatial planning is under the influence of the European INSPIRE directive. It is necessary to spread an awareness about how to build this infrastructure in terms of INSPIRE. The article describes the current ways how to build the spatial data infrastructure. Furthermore, a new approach - GeoPortal4everybody, based also on using of social networking principles is proposed. Next, the paper presents using of GeoPortal4everybody concept as a part of technological framework for vocational education partially developed in the SDI-EDU project. This project aims on creating of online educational platform for spatial planners. The educational content is concentrated mainly on issues related to INSPIRE, Spatial Data Infrastructure and spatial planning. Finally the paper gives an overview of the main parts of the educational platform like GeoPortal4everybody and BizBiz tools.

A Country Profile of the Czech Republic Based on an LADM for the Development of a 3D Cadastre

The paper presents a country profile for the cadastre of the Czech Republic based on the ISO 19152:2012 Land Administration Domain Model (LADM). The proposed profile consists of both legal and spatial components and represents an important driving force with which to develop a 3D cadastre for the Czech Republic, which can guide the Strategy for the Development of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the Czech Republic to 2020. This government initiative emphasizes the creation of the National Set of Spatial Objects, which is defined as the source of guaranteed and reference 3D geographic data at the highest possible level of detail covering the entire territory of the Czech Republic. This can also be a potential source of data for the 3D cadastre. The abstract test suite stated in ISO 19152:2012—Annex A (Abstract Test Suite) and the LADM conformance requirements were applied in order to explore the conformity of the Czech country profile with this international standard. To test their conformity, a mapping of elements between the LADM and the tested country profile was conducted. The profile is conformant with the LADM at Level 2 (medium level) and can be further modified, especially when legislation is updated with respect to 3D real estate in the future.

3D Cartography as a Platform for Remindering Important Historical Events: The Example of the Terezín Memorial

Creation of 3D web maps is rapidly developing field with increasing importance and huge impact on 3D cartography. It is dealing not only with perceiving of space and space-relations of objects in 3D environment (apart from traditional 2D cartography), but thanks to the approachability of data via Internet, also with accessibility of those 3D web maps for the general public.

Compression of 3D Geographical Objects at Various Level of Detail

Compression of 3D objects has been recently discussed mainly in the domain of 3D computer graphics. However, more and more applications demonstrate that the third dimension plays an important role also in the domain of modelling and streaming of geographical objects. This is especially true for 3D city models and their distribution via internet. Despite the fact that compression of textual information related to geographical objects has a significant importance, in this paper we concentrate only on compression of geometry information and also on more complex geometries with irregular shapes. Considering the compression of 3D geographical objects, the 3D triangle meshes representation are used. 3D mesh compression is a way how to reduce the required cost of storage for triangle meshes without losing any details. The triangle is the basic geometric primitive for standard graphics rendering hardware. The compression algorithm aims at storing the input data into a binary file that is as small as possible. For encoding of the mesh connectivity, our compression implements the popular Edgebreaker algorithm. The character of geometry encoding is largely governed by the way connectivity is encoded. A popular choice of prediction for the Edgebreaker algorithm is the parallelogram predictor. It has been observed in Vasa and Brunnett (IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph 19(9):1467–1475, 2013) that such prediction can be further improved by taking a two-step approach, first transmitting the complete connectivity and only afterwards transmitting the geometry. We used this approach to compress geographical objects at various level of detail. It does not bring an improvement for all datasets, especially meshes with many parallelogram shape prediction stencils do not benefit from it. However for complex geographical objects (bridges in our case) the used algorithm works nicely and after the compression the amount of data is even lower than 4 % of the original file size.

Localization of Manuscript Müller’s Maps

The paper describes a localization of Müller’s maps of regions of Bohemia from 1712 to 1718. Original maps represent the territories within regional boundaries in approximate scale 1: 100 000. It is relatively problematic to extract spatial information from the maps based on precise geodetic control and well-known cartographic projection. A different approach must be chosen in case of old maps without geodetic control and identifiable cartographic projection. In such a case the identical points whose coordinates in the reference coordinate system are known must be identified in the old map and their cartometric coordinates measured. This is also the case of manuscript Müller’s maps. For creation of a transformation key the suitable input data must be selected. As the most frequented features on these maps are settlements it was decided to use this part of planimetric component. Several ways how to use the settlements for transformation were explored in order to find out the most appropriate way of localization of these rare old maps. For purpose of old maps localization the database of settlements (DBS) was used. This database is based on the Territorial Identification Register of Basic Settlement Units (TIR-BSU) which has been created in 1992–2004 and contains current coordinates of settlements. Furthermore, after transformation, the analysis of the visualization accuracy of watercourses was done.