Road clearances in IMSMA
From Gerhard Bechtold, Chief Info, UNMEE - MACC
A significant workload in our mine action programme is demining of roads. Every week we define tasks for roads ? many of these are for roads, which have not been tracked or were even unknown to us until recently.
Is there any IMSMA installation out there with a similar situation?
IMSMA is not designed to handle linear features such as roads. This can be overcome to a certain degree by buffering roads (2+2 m) and thus forming polygons. There are various problems with that approach to be mentioned here shortly:
- Narrow polygons do not show on maps (except very large scale maps at 1:10,000 or larger),
- the unit for road clearances is km, not sqm,
- the number of perimeter points is very large (tens of thousands of points).
We define roads as 'clearances', after being cleared as 'completion survey'. We also mark them in our GIS road database as 'cleared road', which enables the display of those roads in any scale.
How do other colleagues handle this?
