The Offices for Land Surveying of a further two German States have joined the project to use Laser-Scan technology to develop their generalisation capability.

Saarland and Thüringen join existing members from Baden-Württemberg, Rheinland-Pfalz and Nordrhein-Westfalen.

The project is developing a standard software module based on Laser-Scan's LAMPS2 for model generalisation. The generalisation starts with the Base Digital Landscape Model (Basis-DLM) (at scales between 1:10,000 and 1:25,000) and derives a coarser landscape model at a scale of 1:50,000 (DLM 50). Included in the project is the development of transfer facilities using a new German standard NAS (Normbasierte Austauschschnittstelle) as well as the existing EDBS (Einheitliche Datenbankschnittstelle).

Laser-Scan Managing Director Dr Michael Sanderson commented:

"We are delighted that Saarland and Thüringen are taking part in this prestigious project. Theircontribution will help to further disseminate the benefits that generalisation capabilities deliver."

The Offices for Land Surveying are responsible for the state survey and the real estate cadastre; they cooperate within the Working Committee of the Surveying Authorities of the States of the Federal Republic of Germany (Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Vermessungsverwaltungen der L䮤er der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (AdV).

Konrad Birth, the head of the AdV project technical committee says:

"We are glad that a further two German States now support the AdV-Project 'ATKIS-Model-Generalisation'. The new tool will automatically derive and update datasets with a lower resolution from our base data "ATKIS-Basis-DLM". It will ensure the DLM50 to be a unified dataset, which is of special importance for Germany, because data capturing is done by the different surveying and mapping agencies of the German states."

Laser-Scan's LAMPS2 Generaliser product is based on the results of the highly successful AGENT (Automated GEneralisation New Technology) project (Esprit 24939). Combined with the underlying Gothic Object-Oriented spatial database and toolkit, Generaliser can make possible exciting and profitable new automated flowlines for generalisation. This project will develop Laser-Scan's existing capabilities for data model generalisation in conjunction with its world leading cartographic capabilities.

www.laser-scan.com