Geomatics

Geomatics is a modern, self-contained discipline in the fields of geospatial information, geosciences, engineering and ICT. It deals with the acquisition, processing, modeling, analysis and visualization of spatially referenced data. This concerns geometric, physical and socio-economic features of our earth, spatial information infrastructures of the built and natural environment and the simulation of geodata processes. The data comes from many different sources, including satellites, air and sea sensors, ground-based measurements, surveys and statistics, and analog maps. Today’s techniques make extensive use of GNSS and often involve society.The data is processed using the latest information and communication technologies (ICT), often in geographic information systems (GIS), and is based on a wide range of mathematical algorithms and models. Geomatics therefore plays an important role in products and services that depend on geospatial data and spatial calculations. Today it impacts numerous disciplines including environmental management, land development and planning, engineering, earth and life sciences, transportation, logistics, and utilities.Since economic and political decisions are increasingly based on geospatial information, geomatics plays a key role for society as a whole. The modern mobile society creates new challenges with an enormous increase in applications such as location-based services, 3D city models, crowd-sourced mapping, big data, UAV, indoor navigation and mobile GIS.