SATELLITE IMAGE MAPS FOR THE AUSTRIAN ARMED FORCES - DESIGN, PRODUCTION AND SOME EDITORIAL AND TECHNICAL PROBLEMS

R. Ditz

Ministry of Defence, Institute of Military Geography, Vienna, Austria

kdofueu.img.geo@bmlv.gv.at

One product produced at the Institute of Military Geography are Military Fact Sheets of countries, interesting due to their political and military situation and/or the commitment of the Austrian Armed Forces. These fact sheets present the geography, the political and the cultural situation and give some practical information about the language, the behaviour and some useful addresses of the selected countries.

Beside some thematic maps used in the fact sheets, the Institute of Military Geography started in 2005 to produce satellite image maps as a supplement of these fact sheets. The first prototype was a satellite image map of Khartoum at the scale of 1:10 000. The basis of this map is a high resolution satellite image with some additional information like street names and the locations of important features like airport, hospitals and embassies.

During the production of further satellite image maps, the design of the maps had to be adapted due to conditions of the satellite images and the attained experience of the production. As a result of the high costs and the not always utilised extent of the satellite images we started to produce an overview map with a smaller scale on the back side. The exception is the processing of small countries, where Landsat satellite images are the basis of the overview map of the entire country.

This article will explain the production workflow in general and some editorial and technical problems of the production. The development of the design of these satellite image maps will be presented as well as the reasons for changes. The first problem in the production workflow is the mosaicking of several image scenes, especially with different exposure times. Demonstrated will be this problem with Landsat images of Albania.

The use of text and fonts in combination with the satellite image is one of the central design problems. With the change of the production program from Macromedia Freehand to Adobe Illustrator this technical solution of the text problem was also a challenge to adapt within this new production environment. The most difficult problem in the production workflow is gathering additional information, not only the locations of the presented features as well as the information of street names. This article shows some pragmatically ways to handle this difficulties.