Yemen rolls out digital map project
Yemen: Yemen recently rolled out a 3D map project which provides government entities and other users with detailed aerial imagery of all its territory. The map project, launched April 20, 2014, by President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, will help the health, education, agriculture, security and other sectors carry out their work, officials told Al-Shorfa.
To date, the project has produced 717 three-dimensional digital maps of Yemen and its provincial capitals at a cost of more than one billion Yemeni riyals ($4.7 million).
The project involved aerial colour photography at a precision of one metre for all the territory of the republic, including all of the islands and the border areas, in addition to the provincial capitals at a precision of 20 centimetres. The company carrying out the project, Fugro Maps, worked with the Yemen Remote Sensing and GIS Centre to populate the digital map with the names of all Yemen's administrative units and population centres, as well as the names of mountains, valleys, historical monuments and archaeological sites, incorporating information from old maps. Four specialised aircraft conducted the imaging.
The aerial imaging process was conducted from 2006–2008, and the integration with satellite images lasted took around two years to complete. The aerial image-bank of urban or high growth areas will be updated every seven years, with other areas that witness slower growth, such as villages, will be updated every 10 years.
Source: Al-Shorfa
