Indo-Norwegian pact on developing TOPAZ
WAn Indo-Norwegian agreement was signed to collaborate in developing an operational ocean modelling and data assimilation system for the Indian Ocean—the TOPAZ Indian Ocean forecasting system. The parties from Norway are the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre (NERSC) and the University of Bergen (UoB), while the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) and Nansen Environmental Research Centre-India (NERCI) Kochi are from India. According to a press release issued here, the TOPAZ Indian Ocean system has been implemented, assessed and used by a group of scientists of Bergen and Kochi. www.hindu.com

Chinese vice-premier urges scientific outlook
Chinese Vice-Premier Zeng Peiyan has urged authorities responsible for statistics, surveying and mapping, food and tobacco to implement the government’s scientific outlook on development and innovate to improve accuracy and authority. Related authorities should improve their surveying and mapping work to provide a quality service for the country’s construction, he said. http://news.xinhuanet.com

Topcon GNSS first to add China’s Compass signal
Topcon Positioning Systems (TPS) is the first to announce to have successfully tracked signals from the Chinese Compass satellite constellation. It also developed the world’s first GNSS technology to pick up signals from GPS, GLONASS, the planned Galileo satellite system.

Edited by Abbas Rajabifard
ISBN 978-0-7325-1620-8
Published by Centre for SDIs and Land Administration,
Department of Geomatics,
The University of Melbourne

Towards a Spatially Enabled Society

‘Spatially enabled government’, ‘spatially enabled society’, ‘spatially enabled’…… These are terms which we are hearing more and more of these days. A society or a government can be …

RECENTadvances in information and communication technology (ICT)
have resulted in a changing environment with many interdependencies between organizations. There are various data services produced and consumed within the process of enhancement of pipelines project. This happens along the various phases; feasibility study, land allocation, execution and operation. Problems in data sharing arise from the fact that data services are not properly documented resulting in difficulties in updating data, data duplication and long administrative inter–organisational procedures[1]. This article presents a method for elaborating the trade-off between existing situation and the desired future in case of improving conditional data sharing.

This mega thrust earthquake of Dec 26, 2004 shifted several sites on Indian and Eurasian plates, which has been quantified from various GPS studies. As the relative change in triangular area between different sites is more sensitive than the relative change in their coordinates, it has been attempted to calculate the anomalies in triangular area on daily basis between 12 permanent GPS stations of C-MMACS and 16 IGS stations for a period of 60 days from 1st Dec 2004 – 30th Jan 2005.

The European Union’s INfrastructure for Spatial InfoRmation in Europe (INSPIRE) initiative is ‘inspiring’ for two important reasons. First, because Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council entitled ‘An infrastructure for spatial information in the European Community (INSPIRE)’ (CEC2007) breaks new ground by establishing the legal framework for the creation of a European level spatial data infrastructure and, as a result, the governments of all 27 European Union national member states must modify existing legislation or introduce new legislation to implement its provisions by May 2009. Second, because of the procedures that have been devised for the creation of implementing rules that are generally acceptable to the European stakeholder community who will have to implement them in practice. With these considerations in mind this paper considers the contents of the INSPIRE Directive and discusses the principles underlying the procedures for the formulation of implementing rules.

GATE: A boon for Galileo
Dr. Guenter Heinrichs, Erwi n Loehnert, Elmar Wittmann, Roland Kaniuth
GAGAN Updates
Arjun Singh
Through a scanner, darkly
John Kelly
Galileo is necessary
Dominique Detain
Japan: Augmenting navigation
Akio Yasuda
Inspiring’ INSPIRE
Ian Masser
Estimates of Anomalies in Triangular Area between GPS stations
Sridevi Jade, Saigeetha A J, Vijayan M S M
A strategic approach to data sharing
Mansour Ahmadi Foroushani

MSAS (MTSAT Satellite-based Augmentation System is the Japanese satellite based augmentation system which has been prepared by the Civil Aviation Bureau of Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MILT) and started on 27 September 2007, to serve for improving accuracy, integrity, and availability of GPS positioning on the civil aircrafts. It has two geostationary satellites, called MTSAT-1R and MTSAT-2 located at 140 and 145 degrees in the east longitude, on the orbit of 3600km above the Equator. The satellites were launched in February of 2005 and 2006 respectively, long after the launch failure on November 1999. MTSAT, which stands for Multi-functional Transport SATellite, also has a function of geostationary metrological satellite.

Europe is building its own global satellite navigation system, Galileo, which will offer very accurate positioning and timing, under civilian responsibility. This system will be compatible with the two other existing systems, GPS and GLONASS. A user will be able to use the same receiver to calculate his position from signals sent out by any satellites combination, however Galileo will offer to all users a bi frequency system that will allow knowing position within one meter of accuracy, which is unprecedented for an openly accessible service. Apart from extreme circumstances, it will always be available and its users will be informed in a few seconds of a potential disruption of one of the satellites. Thus it will be usable for safety of life applications, requiring the highest security level, such as plane landing, train circulation or car guidance.