Strategic Partnership and the Geospatial Market in Romania

Selling trough, not to

by Simon J. Fletcher, Laser-Scan Ltd.

The major problem in Romania is not obtaining technology to manipulate and manage geospatial data but producing hardcopy maps from that data. There is an almost complete absence of hardcopy mapping. Through the establishment of strategic partnerships, the country is putting to good use the tools and solutions which will make map information more freely available, more easily tailored for different end-users and more rapidly updatable.

Map data has become much more readily available since the fall of communism in the former Eastern Bloc countries. There is a new spirit of geographic openness and those concerned have quickly grasped the potential of the "compile once, update many times", object-based approach to mapping as a way of adding value and reducing costs. However, these developments have not been without their problems. There have been struggles to overcome both economic and cultural barriers.

Romania - Some Special Challenges

Romania has built up a leading geospatial data management company (Geo Strategies, based in Sibiu), whose operation is powered by technology from UK specialist Laser-Scan. However, the difficulty remains in producing hardcopy maps from data. The former policy of censorship affected map production. Ceausescu dismantled the presses in order to control the flow of information, so that the country now has no viable printing or publishing industry. This absence has led to an immense demand for hardcopy mapping. The only way to address the shortage is by getting it from elsewhere.

Bureaucracy Bureaucracy also remains a problem. The import and export of goods, particularly high-technology equipment such as Pentium computers, conflicts with current customs regulations. Employees still have to request formal documents to clear them both for travel within Romania and from its airports. On a commercial level, this can present considerable obstacle to arranging visits to customers at home and abroad. However, these difficulties have, in some senses, made Romania into a more competitive marketplace. Romanian banks, for instance, do not understand the concept of loans and most commercial organisations are not eligible for any form of grant or subsidy. Consequently, any business which wants to succeed has to "pull itself up by its bootstraps" but, having done so, it is entirely free of external debt.

International Outlook

It would be a serious mistake to think that the market for Romanian geospatial products is limited to Romania itself. Indeed, Romania supplies geospatial data products to some of the key players in Japanese, American and Western European commerce, including Motorola, France Telecom, Ericsson, Nippon Electric, McDonalds and the BBC. Map data from Trieste to Nepal, from the Ukraine to Cyprus and from Asia Minor to the Arabian peninsula all comes out of Romania. A whole host of mapping markets are addressed, including tourism, DTM compilation, clutter mapping, demographic applications and Government administration - the Romanian Law 18 provisions for cadastral survey being a particularly good example of the latter. The secret of success currently appears to boil down to one issue: how base data is captured, manipulated and maintained in order to help users to realise the potential of their data investment. Data capture and supply forms 40 per cent of Geo Strategies' sales, for instance.

Strategic Partnership

The geospatial software behind these processes is currently well deployed and well-supported in Romania. The same systems as those that are used by Ordnance Survey and the Hydrographic Office in the UK, by the Canadian Centre for Geomatics, by Mexico's INEGI and by other national cartographic offices around the world are currently operating successfully there. Romania, however, could simply not have supported this scale of implantation on a commercial base. The only way to address the need for geospatial products has been through setting up strategic partnerships in the form of distributorships and reseller networks. These relationships are invaluable, not only for technology transfer, training and support, but also to present a culturally acceptable shop-window for products and services having very non-Romanian origins. Commerce respects sensitivities! Strategic partnerships have enabled companies operating in commercially difficult conditions in Romania to build their reputation on the basis of geospatial products and services that would otherwise have been unavailable to them.

Flowlines

Broadly speaking, geospatial data products in Romania are produced from a combination of hardcopy redigitisation, resurvey and increasingly remotely sensed images. (Geo Strategies has recently set up an image processing department and has worked with the National Remote Sensing Centre in the UK, for example.) Typically, digitisation is a semi-automated process using raster-to-vector conversion software. In the process shown, the data is also topologically structured at this stage.

This builds implicit connectivity into the data model itself - making the network analysis of water supplies, for example, or road systems, immediately effective, without the need for further processing. The data is then fed to map production software, which interfaces with digitisation tables for the manual addition of updates. The map production software is networked; according to the type of software in use and the operating system administrating it, varying numbers of operators may be able to access and/or edit the same dataset simultaneously in order to expedite the compiling of the map.

Peripherals

The system will usually also support peripherals such as scanners (for the input of additional raster data, either for vectorisation or for use as a backdrop), high resolution cartographic plotters (for hardcopy map printout) and laser printers (for sample hardcopy). Remotely sensed information can be incorporated either by using an integrated GIS suited to handling imagery or a 3D softcopy photogrammetry tool which can feed directly into, and dynamically update, a geospatial database powering a mapping application. The SOCET SET tool, produced by LH Systems in San Diego, USA, is a good example of the latter approach.

Map Use

Mapping markets in Romania are fairly clearly defined in terms of their requirements for scale and visualisation. Small scale topographic maps are the basis for all national development programmes: road and rail, electricity and water, agriculture and forestry. They are also used for environmental protection, demographic studies and national security. Thematic maps are used for a number of end-user applications, including forestry and road mapping, geological and land use mapping, pollution control and species monitoring. For urban mapping, large scale maps form the basis for all future developments of the national infrastructure. There are currently programmes underway to produce digital versions of these maps in the range 1:500 to 15,000. The data for these maps is checked to the UK Ordnance Survey's NJUG standards and may be directly imported into planners' GIS software.

Reference Systems

Romania has found, as in so many branches of IT, that the vision of the future must be compatible with the realities of the past. In addition to supplying data in the UTM (Universal Transverse Mercator) projection, based on the WGS-84 ellipsoid, Romanian mapping providers must also offer the Gauss Kruger projection, based on the Krassovski ellipsoid. The first serves modern mapping needs which have an element of international collaboration (for instance, GPS navigation) whereas the second is suitable for use with former Soviet-based mapping systems. Given that Romania's geospatial data markets include the former Soviet republics, as well as Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, amongst others, this is a crucial product refinement.

Future Romania's geospatial data marketplace is still primarily focused around mapping. Thanks to strategic partnerships, those concerned are putting to good use the tools and solutions which will make map information more freely available, more easily tailored for different end-users and more rapidly updatable. But the country still has some ground to cover. There is an industry-wide realisation that building processing power into the data model rather than the application is a much more effective way of working, particularly, for example, with Internet products, and this architecture is exploited most effectively by building specialist applications on top of it. The future of the wider geospatial field in Romania will belong to those partners who address their specialist markets in this way. The future of mapping in the country will belong to those partners who adopt the same intelligent core technology to drive their own map production programmes.

Concluding Remarks

Recent developments in some key geospatial enterprises demonstrate that a database-centric approach to data modelling, maintenance and management is indisputably the way forward. Ordnance Survey in the UK, for example, has recently invested in software to enable it to unite all its data sources into one central resource and edit them all using a single tool. In the same country, the Automobile Association uses one single database to drive both its specific cartographic production process and its route planning services. There is no reason why Romania, too, should not evolve its geospatial technologies similarly effectively. Indeed, with the right support - and given its recent successes in markets both within and without Romania - the country's realisable geospatial potential will be enormous.

 

GIM International No 4, Vol 13, April 1999