The Customer:
The newly formed local councils in Cheshire
The Project:
Over the past 60 years Cheshire County Council has had several traditional aerial surveys flown. These surveys exist as either prints or original film. Cheshire wanted as much of this historically significant data made available digitally across the corporate GIS for a variety of applications. Some of the surveys were held by third parties and the associated data was sparse. This would make the scanning and processing of the photography more problematic.
Applications of the aerial photographic maps were to include archaeological assessments of potential development sites and research by highways to investigate changes in the line and width of the highway to determine, for example, the extent of the highway that is maintainable at the public expense. It was hoped the imagery will also be put to use in public rights of way, land regeneration, enforcement, planning, contaminated land, change detection and legal applications.
The Solution:
Bluesky created three historically important aerial photomaps using original films or prints dating back to the early eighties. Bluesky scanned georeferenced and mosaiced nearly three thousand individual photographs to create the three high resolution, digital aerial datasets for use within the Councils’ geographical information system (GIS) and possible future use via the respective councils’ websites. Metadata was also produced for every scan and resulting orthorectified image.
The newly created digital datasets were made available across the two Councils, Cheshire - West & Chester Council and Cheshire East Council - giving staff, alongside other surveys, access to five different epochs of aerial imagery spanning more than sixty years.
The Feedback:
“When planning for the present and the future any authority needs to consider and understand the value of the past, especially the last ten to twenty years, and the value of temporal information held within historic datasets such as aerial photographs. Like many authorities we held older county wide aerial surveys in hard copy format stored in filing cabinets. Although consulted by a few specialist staff the real potential of the imagery could only be tapped if the images were converted to a digital format” David Matthews, GIS Officer of Cheshire Shared Services.
The Duration:
2009 - 2010