Best Practices for Mission Applications

Spatial Data Creation from Satellite Imagery and Source Documents

—Patrice Moore, Justin Daniel, and James Mooney, Spatial Engineering, Inc.

Spatial data is a valuable asset used at US Army Central. It is the foundation for mission support of planning, design and construction, environmental stewardship, and sustainment. Because of its role, consolidated, standardized, accurate, and up-to-date spatial data is critical. As part of an ongoing effort to consolidate and standardize all data within the USARCENT AOR, spatial data of various formats and sources needed to be analyzed and converted into a single format useable by many functions. As a result, US Army Central identified over 400 sites for feature extraction from satellite imagery throughout Iraq and Afghanistan including 'boots on the ground' field verification at 46 locations. This enormous effort resulted in over 700,000 features mapped across Iraq and Afghanistan. Processes and procedures were refined for a host of factors, such as control and cataloging of satellite imagery, feature extraction from imagery, attribution/augmentation of the extracted datasets with non-spatial legacy data, and integrating valid on-the-ground data collections to produce consolidated spatial datasets. Best practices were developed for workflow processes, guides for data interpretation and processing, methodologies for consistency, and quality management practices.