Václav Čada

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.

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.

Using Constraints in Delaunay and Greedy Triangulation for Contour Lines Improvement

Automatic computation of contour lines on a triangulation is a difficult problem because due to input data digitization and the type of triangulation used, some triangles can be a source of a strange behaviour of the contour lines. In this paper, we show what problems can appear in contour lines when Delaunay or greedy triangulations are used and how the contour lines can be improved using constraints in the triangulation. We improved contour lines by manually imposing constraints in a triangulation editing program. Automation of this process is a next step of our work.

Project Catastrum Grenzsteine—State of the Art in Czechia

This paper summarizes information on project Catastrum Grenzsteine and its state of the art in Czechia. Project Catastrum Grenzsteine aims at submitting selected historical boundary marks and related infrastructure for the UNESCO World Heritage title. Reasons for this proposal—example of continuity of administrative units, example of technical knowledge, etc.—are given briefly while the rest of the paper presents several researches that have already been accomplished in this scope—reconstruction of boundaries of former administrative units is based on written documentation of former cadastres. Classification of boundary lines expressing probability of the presence of historical boundary marks is based on analyses of landscape and coincidence of former boundaries. Finally, the web application for crowdsourcing of historical boundary marks data is described.

Datasets of Basic Spatial Data in Chosen Countries of the European Union

The fundaments for creating high-quality European data infrastructure, which is based on different national data infrastructures, are good basic spatial data of individual European countries. The purpose of using this infrastructure is especially European environmental policy. Expected quality calls for appropriate methods of data collection, its content and management. On national level the need of actual data with guaranteed quality applied to decision making in public administration, is much more important. Geographic data fulfilling such requirements should distinguish itself by high level of details, information about ownership or higher accuracy. Activities in passive infrastructure, transport infrastructure, spatial planning and other services explicitly require such type of geodata. The aim of this paper is to compare the content of national datasets, the level of detail and quality, collection method and data management in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic according to chosen criteria.

Centrality as a Method for the Evaluation of Semantic Resources for Disaster Risk Reduction

Clear and straightforward communication is a key aspect of all human activities related to crisis management. Since crisis management activities involve professionals from various disciplines using different terminology, clear and straightforward communication is difficult to achieve. Semantics as a broad science can help to overcome communication difficulties. This research focuses on the evaluation of available semantic resources including ontologies, thesauri, and controlled vocabularies for disaster risk reduction as part of crisis management. The main idea of the study is that the most appropriate source of broadly understandable terminology is such a semantic resource, which is accepted by—or at least connected to the majority of other resources. Important is not only the number of interconnected resources, but also the concrete position of the resource in the complex network of Linked Data resources. Although this is usually done by user experience, objective methods of resource semantic centrality can be applied. This can be described by centrality methods used mainly in graph theory. This article describes the calculation of four types of centrality methods (Outdegree, Indegree, Closeness, and Betweenness) applied to 160 geographic concepts published as Linked Data and related to disaster risk reduction. Centralities were calculated for graph structures containing particular semantic resources as nodes and identity links as edges. The results show that (with some discussed exceptions) the datasets with high values of centrality serve as important information resources, but they also include more concepts from preselected 160 geographic concepts. Therefore, they could be considered as the most suitable resources of terminology to make communication in the domain easier. The main research goal is to automate the semantic resources evaluation and to apply a well-known theoretical method (centrality) to the semantic issues of Linked Data. It is necessary to mention the limits of this study: the number of tested concepts and the fact that centralities represents just one view on evaluation of semantic resources.

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.