{"id":245402,"date":"2019-06-23T23:55:06","date_gmt":"2019-06-24T06:55:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcnews&p=245402"},"modified":"2019-06-20T12:41:42","modified_gmt":"2019-06-20T19:41:42","slug":"a-little-innovation-goes-a-long-way","status":"publish","type":"arcnews","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/a-little-innovation-goes-a-long-way","title":{"rendered":"A Little Innovation Goes a Long Way"},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1041,10372,91],"tags":[23402,11642,20382,276052,282732],"arcnews_issues":[362452],"class_list":["post-245402","arcnews","type-arcnews","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-collaboration","category-gis-hero","category-mapping","tag-automation","tag-cadastre","tag-cartography","tag-map-production","tag-netherlands","arcnews_issues-summer-2019","arcnews_sections-gis-people"],"acf":{"short_description":"Under the leadership of GIS customer solutions manager Ben Bruns, Dutch Kadaster automated multiscale map production\u2014and shared its methods.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Dutch Kadaster, the Netherlands\u2019 national cadastre, land registry, and mapping agency, was the first mapping authority in the world to fully automate the production of multiscale maps and data. This was a huge accomplishment, given that, although the mapping community had buzzed about the potential of automating multiresolution geospatial map production for decades, many were still skeptical that it could even be done. The feat is even more impressive considering that it was carried out by a small, motley team that was in a bind.\r\n\r\nIn 2010, the government in the Netherlands legislated that Dutch Kadaster had to update the nation\u2019s topographical maps more frequently\u2014every two years instead of every four to six years. At the same time, however, the geoinformation department at Dutch Kadaster was facing staff and budget cuts as a result of the ongoing global recession. The department was going to have to produce more information at a quicker clip with fewer people."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":245442,"image_position":"right","orientation":"vertical","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Ben Bruns, the manager of Dutch Kadaster\u2019s GIS customer solutions department, knew that his team was going to have to innovate. He had gotten a tip from Jantien Stoter, a professor at Delft University of Technology who was also a consultant at Dutch Kadaster, that Esri had some automation technology that was ready to use. Bruns took that information and ran with it.\r\n\r\n\u201cWithin a half a year, we had accomplished automatic generalization,\u201d said Vincent van Altena, a senior GIS specialist at Dutch Kadaster, referring to what would become multiresolution geospatial map production. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t perfect, but it was fully automated. Even the most severe critics were amazed at what we had done.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThe system takes Dutch Kadaster\u2019s best-scale data, which is TOP10NL, and automates the process from beginning to end, using that data to automatically produce the map products it needs,\u201d said Mark Cygan, Esri\u2019s director of national mapping and statistics solutions. \u201cThe system encapsulates the production process in 400 geoprocessing models, which are aggregated into three big geoprocessing models. The team can then push what Ben calls the make map button<\/em> to generate maps for the whole country in one pass.\u201d\r\n\r\nNow, Dutch Kadaster delivers updated and higher-quality topographical maps of the Netherlands in less than two years. And, according to Cygan, the organization keeps improving.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe last I saw, Dutch Kadaster was able to do all the 1:50,000-scale maps for the country in two weeks with one operator,\u201d said Cygan.\r\n\r\nBut the innovation didn\u2019t stop there. After automating Dutch Kadaster\u2019s 1:50,000-scale maps, the team was soon able to automate the Netherlands\u2019 1:100,000-scale maps, as well as the country\u2019s basemap, which has 15 different zoom levels. Then the geoinformation division automated all its maps with scales ranging from 1:25,000 to 1:1,000,000.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis was Ben\u2019s vision from day one, when he started with automatic generalization,\u201d said Iris Reimerink, a senior GIS specialist at Dutch Kadaster. \u201cThe day we did it was a milestone for him. I remember him saying, \u2018I knew this was possible long before we started it.\u2019\u201d\r\n\r\nOnce Dutch Kadaster figured out how to automate its own map products, Bruns and his team set out to share what they did with other mapping agencies around the world. In the ensuing years, the team hosted four workshops that national geospatial authorities from at least 25 countries attended. The group not only taught these agencies about the technology that makes automation work, but it also shared how it handled the change management part of the process.\r\n\r\n\u201cMapmakers from Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) attended the workshops, and there\u2019s a direct correlation to the incredible automation work they have done over the past few years,\u201d said Cygan. \u201cSame with Great Britain\u2019s Ordnance Survey (OS) and many other mapping authorities around the world.\u201d\r\n\r\nWhile all this was accomplished by a skilled team of people working both at and with Dutch Kadaster, \u201cit was Ben\u2019s leadership, and the belief of Kadaster\u2019s executives in his leadership abilities, that made it all possible,\u201d added Cygan.\r\n\r\nBruns, who has a master\u2019s degree in geoinformation technology from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, began his career at Dutch Kadaster as a cartographer. He quickly progressed into management roles, including the head of one of the cartography division\u2019s sections, the product manager for topography, and the manager of GIS customer solutions. According to several colleagues, he\u2019s always found ways to innovate.\r\n\r\nAround 1995, he was commissioned to lead the Dutch contribution to the Vector Map (VMap) program, an international project that encouraged countries to digitize and share their map data. In addition to being project lead, Bruns was an active developer on VMap, cooperating with both IT and production staff. When VMap was replaced by the Multinational Geospatial Co-production Program (MGCP), a defense initiative aimed at digitizing and sharing high-resolution vector data for places dealing with humanitarian or military crises, Dutch Kadaster\u2019s topographic service (which is now the geoinformation department) became a testing ground and quality control center under Bruns\u2019s leadership.\r\n\r\nBruns was also closely involved in the development of TOP10NL, a 1:10,000-scale topographic geodatabase of the Netherlands.\r\n\r\n\u201cBen was one of the originators of this,\u201d said van Altena. \u201cHe designed the data model along with his colleagues and led the technical implementation. That\u2019s really important because if there was no TOP10NL, automatic generalization would not have been possible.\u201d\r\n\r\nIt also wouldn\u2019t have been possible without Bruns\u2019s imaginative leadership style. When his team suddenly had to accelerate map production, he came up with a concept called HIGH5, which brings people from different departments and backgrounds together for five weeks to solve a problem.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis was one of the first times we used HIGH5,\u201d recalled van Altena. \u201cThe results were so promising that we got the green light to keep using it.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs Dutch Kadaster waded deeper into automation, Bruns and his boss, Ulrike Schild, Dutch Kadaster\u2019s head of geoinformation, also adhered to the lean management philosophy.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe philosophy is, you have a lot of spillage in a production process, so you need to try to eliminate that. The best way to do that is to evaluate all individual production steps, and if it does not add customer value to your end product, it has to go,\u201d explained Marc Post, who\u2019s also a senior GIS specialist for Dutch Kadaster. \u201cThis customer-oriented approach was something completely new within Dutch Kadaster, and it took a lot of effort and courage to introduce that into a world of traditional cartographic work.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cThis had a huge impact on production acceleration,\u201d added van Altena.\r\n\r\nAnother management philosophy that Bruns abides by is having a heterogeneous team.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe members of his teams must have different expertise,\u201d said van Altena, whose background is in theology. \u201cIf people from different backgrounds are able to communicate with each other, they can come up with different ideas.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cIn his quest for a team, Ben is looking for unique characters, not copies or clones,\u201d said Reimerink, whose training is in conservation and GIS.\r\n\r\n\u201cEach member of my team is creative, tenacious, independent, and stubborn,\u201d said Bruns. \u201cIncredible innovations arise from the energy that comes from giving these distinctive people space and direction.\u201d\r\n\r\n\u201cHe also truly believes that everyone on his team is doing their best and is being honest about what\u2019s going on,\u201d added Post, whose background is in conservation as well. \u201cWithout that trust, the innovation doesn\u2019t happen.\u201d\r\n\r\nIn the same vein, Bruns trusted Dutch Kadaster\u2019s customers to tell his team what they wanted to see in their maps and involved them directly in the automation process.\r\n\r\n\u201cCartographers have a traditional way of doing things, according to a list of specifications, but to automate our map production, we had to create new rules,\u201d Post explained.\r\n\r\n\u201cBen\u2019s team members said, these maps aren\u2019t going to look like they did in the past, but they\u2019ll meet customers\u2019 needs,\u201d said Cygan. \u201cThey then went directly to users and asked, is this map going to meet your needs and do everything you need it to do? All of Dutch Kadaster\u2019s major customers were happy with the results, and many said they couldn\u2019t tell the difference from previous maps. Other mapping agencies, including OSi and OS, are finding the same thing.\u201d\r\n\r\nNow that Dutch Kadaster has a handle on automatic multiscale mapping, Bruns\u2019s team is in the process of developing an automatically constructed 3D topographic dataset for the Netherlands, taken from point clouds and 2D base data. The geoinformation division is also exploring using machine learning techniques for topographic data. It seems that the innovation will never stop."},{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Center","content":"Read other articles in the GIS Heroes<\/a> series.","snippet":""}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"\nA Little Innovation Goes a Long Way<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Under the leadership of GIS customer solutions manager Ben Bruns, Dutch Kadaster automated multiscale map production\u2014and shared its methods.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/a-little-innovation-goes-a-long-way\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Little Innovation Goes a Long Way\" 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