Geomatics is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as the "discipline concerned with the collection, distribution, storage, analysis, processing, presentation of geographic data or geographic information". Under another definition, it consists of products, services and tools involved in the collection, integration and management of geographic (geospatial) data. Surveying engineering was the widely used name for geomatic(s) engineering in the past. Geomatics was placed by the UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems under the branch of technical geography.
Photogrammetry is the science and technology of obtaining reliable information about physical objects and the environment through the process of recording, measuring and interpreting photographic images and patterns of electromagnetic radiant imagery and other phenomena.
Geoinformatics is a scientific field primarily within the domains of Computer Science and technical geography. It focuses on the programming of applications, spatial data structures, and the analysis of objects and space-time phenomena related to the surface and underneath of Earth and other celestial bodies. The field develops software and web services to model and analyse spatial data, serving the needs of geosciences and related scientific and engineering disciplines. The term is often used interchangeably with Geomatics, although the two have distinct focuses; Geomatics emphasizes acquiring spatial knowledge and leveraging information systems, not their development. At least one publication has claimed the discipline is pure computer science outside the realm of geography.
The concept of a Geospatial Web may have first been introduced by Dr. Charles Herring in his US DoD paper, An Architecture of Cyberspace: Spatialization of the Internet, 1994, U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratory.
Digital Earth is the name given to a concept by former US vice president Al Gore in 1998, describing a virtual representation of the Earth that is georeferenced and connected to the world's digital knowledge archives.
Integrated Land and Water Information System (ILWIS) is a geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing software for both vector and raster processing. Its features include digitizing, editing, analysis and display of data, and production of quality maps. ILWIS was initially developed and distributed by ITC Enschede in the Netherlands for use by its researchers and students. Since 1 July 2007, it has been released as free software under the terms of the GPL-2.0-only license. Having been used by many students, teachers and researchers for more than two decades, ILWIS is one of the most user-friendly integrated vector and raster software programmes currently available. ILWIS has some very powerful raster analysis modules, a high-precision and flexible vector and point digitizing module, a variety of very practical tools, as well as a great variety of user guides and training modules all available for downloading. The current version is ILWIS 3.8.6. Similar to the GRASS GIS in many respects, ILWIS is currently available natively only on Microsoft Windows. However, a Linux Wine manual has been released.
A 3D city model is digital model of urban areas that represent terrain surfaces, sites, buildings, vegetation, infrastructure and landscape elements in three-dimensional scale as well as related objects belonging to urban areas. Their components are described and represented by corresponding two- and three-dimensional spatial data and geo-referenced data. 3D city models support presentation, exploration, analysis, and management tasks in a large number of different application domains. In particular, 3D city models allow "for visually integrating heterogeneous geoinformation within a single framework and, therefore, create and manage complex urban information spaces."
CIPA is one of the oldest International Scientific Committees of the International Council on Monuments and Sites. It was founded in 1968 jointly with the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing to facilitate the transfer of technology from the measurement sciences into the heritage documentation and recording disciplines. CIPA originally stood for the Comité International de Photogrammétrie Architecturale. However this name no longer describes the full scope of its activities, so CIPA Heritage Documentation was established.
The International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS) is an international non-governmental organization that enhances international cooperation between the worldwide organizations with interests in the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences. Originally named International Society for Photogrammetry (ISP), it was established in 1910, and is the oldest international umbrella organization in its field, which may be summarized as addressing “information from imagery”.
Cognition Network Technology (CNT), also known as Definiens Cognition Network Technology, is an object-based image analysis method developed by Nobel laureate Gerd Binnig together with a team of researchers at Definiens AG in Munich, Germany. It serves for extracting information from images using a hierarchy of image objects, as opposed to traditional pixel processing methods.
PCI Geomatica is a remote sensing and photogrammetry desktop software package for processing earth observation data, designed by the PCI Geomatics company. The latest version of the software is Geomatica 2018. Geomatica is aimed primarily at faster data processing and allows users to load satellite and aerial imagery where advanced analysis can be performed. Geomatica has been used by many educational institutions and scientific programs throughout the world to analyze satellite imagery and trends, such as the GlobeSAR Program, a program which was carried out by the Canada Centre for Remote Sensing in the 1990s.
Prof. em. Dr. Armin Gruen is, since 1984, professor and head of the Chair of photogrammetry at the Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry (IGP), Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich, Switzerland. Since 1 August 2009, he is retired and is now with the Chair of Information Architecture, ETH Zurich Faculty of Architecture. He is currently acting as a principal investigator on the Simulation Platform of the SEC-FCL in Singapore.
Remote Sensing is a semimonthly peer-reviewed open access academic journal focusing on research pertaining to remote sensing and other disciplines of geography. It was established in 2009 and is published by MDPI. The founding editor-in-chief was Wolfgang Wagner until September 2, 2011, when he resigned over the journal's publication of a paper co-authored by Roy Spencer, which had received significant criticism from other scientists soon after its publication. Since then, the editor-in-chief has been Prasad S. Thenkabail.
The ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing is the official journal of International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS), publishes scientific and technical articles and reviews in photogrammetry, remote sensing, and related fields. It is published by Elsevier and is edited by Clément Mallet and Qihao Weng. The journal was originally established as Internationales Archiv für Photogrammetrie in 1908, changing its name to Photogrammetria in 1938, and taking its current name in 1989.
DAT/EM Systems International is an Alaska-based company that develops digital photogrammetric mapping applications to extract and edit 3D vector terrain and object features from stereo imagery and point clouds. DAT/EM Systems International develops solutions for the photogrammetry, engineering & GIS industries.
Pix4D is a Swiss software company that specializes in photogrammetry. It was founded in 2011 as a spinoff from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Computer Vision Lab in Switzerland. It develops a suite of software products that use photogrammetry and computer vision algorithms to transform DSLR, fisheye, RGB, thermal and multispectral images into 3D maps and 3D modeling. The company has 7 international offices, with its headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Digital archaeology is the application of information technology and digital media to archaeology. It includes the use of digital photography, 3D reconstruction, virtual reality, and geographical information systems, among other techniques. Computational archaeology, which covers computer-based analytical methods, can be considered a subfield of digital archaeology, as can virtual archaeology.
Sisi Zlatanova is a Bulgarian/Dutch researcher in geospatial data, geographic information systems, and 3D modeling. She works as a professor in the faculty of the Built Environment, at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and is president of Technical Commission IV (Spatial Information Science) of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
Qihao Weng is an American geographer, urban, environmental sustainability, and remote sensing scientist. He has been a Chair Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University since July 2021, and was the Director of the Center for Urban and Environmental Change and is a professor of geography in the Department of Earth and Environmental Systems at the Indiana State University.
Web GIS, or Web Geographic Information Systems, are GIS that employ the World Wide Web to facilitate the storage, visualization, analysis, and distribution of spatial information over the Internet. The World Wide Web, or the Web, is an information system that uses the internet to host, share, and distribute documents, images, and other data. Web GIS involves using the World Wide Web to facilitate GIS tasks traditionally done on a desktop computer, as well as enabling the sharing of maps and spatial data. While Web GIS and Internet GIS are sometimes used interchangeably, they are different concepts. Web GIS is a subset of Internet GIS, which is itself a subset of distributed GIS, which itself is a subset of broader Geographic information system. The most common application of Web GIS is Web mapping, so much so that the two terms are often used interchangeably in much the same way as Digital mapping and GIS. However, Web GIS and web mapping are distinct concepts, with web mapping not necessarily requiring a Web GIS.
