Divisions of Spatial Information Engineering

As a new basis for the information society, "Spatial Data Infrastructure" will support social/economic development and cultural activities. Two main systems are under development in this division. One is for acquiring current spatial data and keeping them in the spatial data infrastructure, while the other is for communicating and visualizing spatial information through the spatial data infrastructure. Many studies are being carried out, and some of them are briefly shown here.

1. Human-Centered Spatial Communication Tools to Enhance Human Spatial Capability in Daily Life

The present GIS focus mainly on geocoded data, such as latitude and longitude and map representations, and have less function for dealing with natural language and real scene representations which are much more often used in enormous amounts of digital content produced by people. New style spatial information tools focusing on human-centered media such as texts and photos are necessary to establish smooth communication between human and computer in dealing with spatial information.

(1) Spatial Album Software: PhotoField:
We proposed photo vectors as a useful context pattern of photos to solve this problem. A photo vector is composed of the starting point as the camera's position and the ending point as some object's position shown in a photo. Introducing the photo vectors into digital photo management software provides users with a richer environment to handle digital photos in spatial ways. Users can find their intended photos via the photo vector field without browsing photos themselves.


Fig 1. An example content of spatial album software "PhotoField". "Digital archives of pictorial diagrams displaying notable sights in Kyoto" at the exhibition "Landscape pictures of notable sights in Kyoto, the past and present" produced at Art Research Center, Ritsumeikan University. (Source: M.Arikawa )

(2) Spatial Document Management System (SDMS):
SDMS, which is highly interactive software developed by us, can extract both addresses and place names from digital documents, geocode the extracted place words into geographic coordinates, and generate pieces of POI (Point of Interest) which can be displayed on a map. Users only drag and drop an icon, which corresponds to a digital document file or a folder on the window content of SDMS in the desktop of pc. Then, SDMS processes it, generates pieces of POI and displays them on a map. SDMS realizes a user-friendly interface to enable users to easily deal with all digital documents as spatial data.


Fig 2. An example of user interface of SDMS (Source: M.Arikawa )

2. Development of Digital Earth and its Application

To realize the concept of the Digital Earth, techniques fusing different spatial data with remotely sensed data are being developed. By integrating simulation models like land use/land cover change models and carbon cycle models of the terrestrial ecosystem, we can generate various scenarios of possible changes of the earth. For example, it can be demonstrated to what extent agricultural land could be expanded if the productivity of agricultural land remains unchanged.

3. Development and Revision of Urban Spatial Data using Aerial Imagery

A system aimed at extracting changes in urban objects from aerial images is being developed. Figure 3 shows the results of 3D buildings automatically extracted from stereo aerial images.

Fig.3 Automatic extraction of geo-changes (Source: Z. Shi )


Fig.4 Digital geographical space accurate to a few hundred millimeters test site (Roppongi) (Source: R.Shibasaki & A.Takuma )