Background
In order to improve administrative efficiency of governments and advise policy makers to take right measures, the Executive Yuan leads a plan to establish an integrated National Geographic Information Systems (NGIS). The main goal of the plan is to help public and private sectors develop GIS industry and upgrade competitiveness.
Ministry of Interior (MOI) is one of the partners of the plan. It conducts the construction of 1:1000-scale digital topographic maps. The large scale maps are the core data of national land information and can provide highly detailed materials and accurate features for urban planning, public utility, hazard relief, civil construction, water conservation as well as public transportation etc. However, to produce whole nationwide 1:1000-scale digital topographic maps cannot be achieved in few years. Besides, the government has no other substitute to satisfy the need of GIS constructors at present. Therefore, National Land Surveying and Mapping Center (NLSC), a branch of MOI, was assigned to create a new kind of maps called Taiwan Electronic Maps (Taiwan e-Map) that can hopefully meet the most needs of public.
The project of Taiwan e-Map was launched in 2007, and has completed whole Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Lienchiang area till 2011. Now, NLSC has a nationwide Taiwan e-Map to serve public, and we will keep update the Map data in the future.
Objective
This Project combined basic geographic information of basic topographic maps, 1:1000-scale digital topographic maps, the geocoding database , land use data, digital road atlas, and aerial photos to establish the database of Taiwan Electronic Map (Taiwan e-Map) on a limited budget and duration.
NLSC implements this project with following objectives :
- To support the infrastructure of NGIS.
- To accelerate the building of base maps.
- To facilitate the circulation of GIS data.
- To reduce the cost of value-added applications.
- To prevent the duplication of public and private sectors.
- To meet most public needs.
Schedule
Short-Term (2007)
- Selected Tainan City and Tainan County as pilot test areas for the task of outsourcing and quality checking of Taiwan Electronic Map (Taiwan e-Map).
- Studied and formulated the procedure of building Taiwan e-Map database and result checking.
Mid-Term (from 2008 to 2011)
- Completed the nationwide Taiwan e-Map, including Penghu, Kinmen and Lienchiang Area.
- Developed the Taiwan e-Map value-added application and management platform.
- Studied and formulated the regulations of circulation and supply of Taiwan e-Map.
Long-Term (after 2012)
- Renew Taiwan e-Map continuously by using the aerial photos of the Aerial Survey and Remote Sensing Branch, Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, Ministry of Agriculture as reference.
- The Taiwan e-Map takes the regular renewal frequency of 2-year from 2014.
- In order to break the limitation of the regular renewal, and enhance the efficiency of updating the Taiwan e-Map closer to the fast changing topographic features nowadays, the Taiwan e-Map accesses various changing information as reference, updating dynamically on the important transportation, landmark, government agencies’ important construction projects, and user’s feedback.
The latest Taiwan e-Map’s production year and areas of coverage
Benefit
Taiwan e-Map contains both the latest orthophoto and the most commonly used vector data including roads, landmarks, and buildings etc. The mapping accuracy is 1.25 meters. The vector data was integrated into GIS format layers that can provide the essentially basic information. It is an integral digital map with the property of whole nationwide coverage, commonality, consistency, thus can satisfy the requirements of national planning, restoration, disaster prevention and relief, etc.
With the objective of data resource sharing in one production to avoid the waste of duplicate investments, Taiwan e-Map could lower the cost and shorten the duration of building essential base map, which can establish the mechanism of data updating, maintain the contents sustainably available.