THE EXPERIENCE OF THE MICROSTATION SOFTWARE USING FOR CARTOGRAPHIC PRODUCTS

Ye. Stakhov

State Scientific and Production Enterprise "Kartographia"

admin@ukrmap.com.ua

 

MicroStation (MS) is a graphic system for automatic designing and drafting in the spheres of machine building, instrument making, architecture, construction, land cadastre, geodesy and cartography. The family of MS consists of innumerable software products made by company Bentley Systems®. Today more and more enterprises and organizations implement this package in some way into the technological process of creation of different cartographic products.  

 

All cartographic works mostly deal with bitmapped images. That is why they need a module, which can provide a wide scale of functional highly effective means for working with white and black and multicolour raster. One of such means is MicroStation Descartes. It is equipped with powerful instrumental means for transformation, geocoordinating, composition of mosaics, filtering and improvement of the images quality. Transparence and show-through ability of images helps in the building of seamless mosaic and in creating of imposition of different images. This system is based on high-speed graphic platform Raster Manager, which supports most of widespread raster formats: tiff, jpg, bmp etc. It is able to save the attached rasters, compressing them by some factor in a programmed way in its format – HMR, and does it with high quality. MS supports a big number of projections and also practically all the popular standards for the determination of altitude coordinates: WGS, EROP50, Pulkovo 1942 and others.

 

Significantly, this product is designed for functioning in conditions of production, and can be adapted to any productive process, which demands automatization and installation of interfaces. Each graphic element (object) in MS, besides its position in the plane of the project and a series of parameters, is described by such attributes, as layer, colour, thickness, style, type of the line, and also the colour of priming (for closed elements). The user can create, save and edit, and also transfer and rewrite library files to other workplaces. Text can be given with any level of compression, even not provided by the type font itself. The text editor makes it possible to download Windows types and also types for topographic maps.

 

We have implemented MicroStation 7 into our productive process about 6 years ago. During this time wide range of products was created. First of all they are maps and atlases, made on the basis of the digital map of Ukraine in the scale of 1:500 000: Hypsometric Map of Ukraine, Political and Administrative Map of Ukraine, Oil and Gas Complex of Ukraine, road maps and atlases and many other thematic maps and atlases in different scales.