SPOTView Thema for the UK

As the complex pressures exerted upon increasingly scarce and valuable land resources strengthen, so new tools that assist the work of land use policy makers, planners and managers are becoming more critical. In the UK, government announcements to build 4 million new homes over the next 20 years have highlighted the requirement for accurate, up-to-date information on land use in order to support the objectives of affordable housing, sustainable development and the re-use of town and city sites.

In response to this need SPOT Image (Toulouse, France), the worldwide distributor of images from the French SPOT earth observation satellites, has developed SPOTView Thema, a revolutionary new product based upon information interpreted from their own high resolution satellite imagery. SPOTView Thema is not an image product, it is a land use vector database designed to be easily ingested and used within a GIS environment. A two year development programme involving close co-operation with end users in France has lead to the pre-launch of the French product this year. Now SPOT View Thema is to be modified for the UK market supported by a grant from CEO under the Product Development and Marketing scheme.

A consortium, lead by SPOT Image, and consisting of Georeference (Toulouse, France), National Remote Sensing Centre Limited (Farnborough, UK) and ESYS Limited (Guildford, UK) is to co-operate in defining the specific requirements of UK customers for such a land use product. With an initial emphasis on urban planning requirements, both technical and marketing issues will be dealt with including:

• land use classification schemes;
• cartographic requirements (i.e. map projection, datum, etc);
• formats and standards;
• pricing and packaging;
• availability and sales channels.

To print or see the Executive summary of the project ====> Click here

For further information about the workshop, or any other aspect of SPOTView Thema, please contact Mr Andrew Shaw at ESYS Limited on +44 (0)1483 304545, e-mail ashaw@esys.co.uk.