National Mapping Agencies

Smarter data for a demanding world

National Mapping Agencies (NMA) are vital to the modern economy.

Demand for geospatial data has never been greater as businesses and consumers build location into more and more decisions.

NMA find themselves in a new world of more demanding customers and nimble, new rivals. Disruptive competitors appear all the time. But, users often find that “good enough” data isn’t really good enough at all.

We partner with NMA around the world to help them provide their uniquely authoritative data as efficiently as possible – speeding up production without sacrificing quality.

Smarter Data

Collecting and curating authoritative geospatial data is traditionally a time-consuming, expert-intensive responsibility.

Our rules-based technology automates historically manual processes like data validation, cleansing, integration, conflation and map generalisation.

By converting your experts’ knowledge into user-managed rules, we turn data management from time-consuming, manual tasks into repeatable routines that can be applied automatically, consistently and objectively.

Our approach dramatically reduces production times at all stages of the data lifecycle. Here are just three examples:

Field collection
Field collection of data is unavoidably expensive and time-consuming but our mobile solutions can run rules automatically on the surveyor’s mobile device to ensure that what is entered conforms to requirements and expectations.

Getting it right first time is the key to effective data capture. With our technology, any errors can be checked and corrected by the expert surveyor, on site, at the time of capture. No expensive re-visits, no second-guessing; just smarter data captured correctly.

Map generalisation
By encoding cartographers’ experience into user-managed rules, our generalisation technology dramatically reduces the time required for map production.

Even difficult judgements – such as label placement or the representation of adjacent features at different scales – can be handled intelligently and consistently.

Automated generalisation enables agencies to hold a single geographic database rather than one database per map-scale series.

The German mapping agency AdV achieved a 40% reduction in map production times using our generalisation technology.

Smarter data
Our solutions can also automatically fix common problems and identify the issues that require expert attention. Your data and cartography experts can be freed from routine tasks to focus where their experience is most valuable – fixing the tricky exceptions and driving innovation.