Methods

This is a useful paper by John Dann at Georigin Ltd, in South Africa, which describes the methods they use to develop digital country maps for Africa. The maps include separate improved roads layers. It also describes a method to develop city-level road maps that may be helpful for inter-city roads as well. Click here to download the paper in PDF format (979 KB, posted with permission from the author).
The following related efforts in Africa come from Kate Lance at GSDI:
- UNJLC Transport Modeling: http://memberservices.gsdi.org/files/&artifact_id=48
- African Union and UNECA roads mapping for Africa: http://geoinfo.uneca.org/maps.htm
Thanks to Koki Iwao of AIST in Japan for mentioning the INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community) initiative as a potential data source for Europe. Here is what the European Parliament Directive says in regards to Transportation as one of the Spatial Data Themes covered by INSPIRE:
- "Road, rail, air and water transport networks and related infrastructure. Includes links between different networks. Also includes the trans-European transport network as defined in Decision No 1692/96/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 July 1996 on Community Guidelines for the development of the trans-European transport network (1) and future revisions of that Decision."
- For more information visit http://inspire.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
One interesting approach to developing roads data is the OpenStreetMap wiki approach. For more information visit:
This Transport Notes by Christopher Bennett et al. of the World Bank Roads and Rural Transport Thematic Group includes useful information about Data Collection Technologies for Roads Management. Many of the technologies and methods are equally useful for roads data development. The methods are also vital for road quality monitoring.
Message by Son Ngheim, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
- "Attached is a white paper on "Global Infrastructure: The Potential of SRTM Data to Break New Ground" by S. Nghiem, D. Balk, C. Small, U. Deichmann, A. Wannebo, R. Blom, P. Sutton, G. Yetman, R. Chen, E. Rodriguez, B. Houshmand, and G. Neumann, JPL Document D-23049, 23 pp., 2001. This document includes a section on "Transportation infrastructure" (Section 5.3) , which can be used as a starting point in the Global Roads Workshop. There are new developments in current and future satellite SAR missions with more advanced capabilities that can be used for road detection and mapping."
Here is an interesting feasibility study on the use of Sigma0 and radar images to extract and classify roads in Central Africa.
- This report by Synetix was forwarded to us by Matt Steil of World Resources Instittute. This study aims to determine whether RADARSAT images can be used for the automated detection of roads in a forested region in Central Africa with the Sigmaroutes algorithm. This algorithm, originally developed for the updating of 1:20,000 topographic maps produced by the Quebec government, will be tested on radar images acquired over two test sites in the Republic of Congo.