1Spatial announced that their long-term, strategic relationship with IGN France has been strengthened further with the French national mapping agency widening their use of 1Spatial’s Radius Clarity technology.
1Spatial’s Radius Clarity technology is playing a crucial role in IGN France’s “New Base Map” project, which has resulted in a new flowline for topographic map production at 1:25,000 scale and, if needed, at 1:50 000 scale. The production flowline involves generalisation, the process of reducing the number of features within the source data and then modifying the way features appear on the map appropriately for a chosen target scale. Radius Clarity, as 1Spatial’s automatic platform for generalisation, therefore represents a key component in this project and one that IGN France has been able to integrate into their overall technology architecture.
The introduction of Radius Clarity has enabled IGN France to use a largely automated process to generate vector digital maps of similar quality to the previous series of manually produced topographic maps. Automation has made the generalisation process quicker, reducing operational costs and time to market for the map series. At the same time, it has reduced the number of manual errors and increased the consistency in the map series. Speeding up the process has only been possible through automation as it would have been too expensive to achieve the same results with a manual editing process. The new series of vector digital maps will cover 100% of French territory, replacing the previous editions that only exist as raster files for 74% of French territory. Several additional Radius Clarity licenses have been purchased by IGN France to enable them to build on this more efficient method of production by investigating new cartographic products and an additional production flowline based on new services for ‘maps on demand’. This will increase their product profile, enabling them to better meet the growing demands of their customer base.
François Lecordix, New Base Map Project Chief at IGN France said:
“Getting this flowline into production is a significant achievement for us and Radius Clarity is an important part of that achievement. This effort allows us to start the 4th generation of Base Map which will be completely obtained from our Large–Scale Geographic Referential (RGE). The project also represents a large step towards our strategic goal of providing in the future better ‘mapping on demand’ services. Our relationship with 1Spatial has always been productive and we look forward to continuing to work with them in the future.”
Nic Snape, Chief Executive Officer at 1Spatial added:
“We are pleased to be further strengthening our long-standing relationship with IGN France. Their new flowline demonstrates the unique capabilities of Radius Clarity to improve operational efficiency through automated processing and to increase the range of products that IGN France can offer the market.”