.

Geoinformatics_03-2009
interview interview with dr. seppe cassettari the geoinformation group the geoinformation group was formed in 1998 through a management buy-out of a very small part of the pearson publishing company by drs. seppe cassetarri and alun jones, who are now respectively the ceo and managing director of the group. over the last ten years, it has steadily expanded its business of supplying geo-referenced and ortho-rectified aerial imagery and the geospatial data that can be derived from it to a wide range of organisations. these imaging products and databases have become well known under the brand name, cities revealed . last year (in 2008), the group was given the small business of the year award by the cambridge evening news. recently the group has expanded its operations into several new areas such as airborne laser scanning and thermal imaging. it seemed to be an appropriate time to find out more about the group s current activities by interviewing dr. cassettari (fig. 1). by gordon petrie fig. 1 dr. seppe cassettari is the chief executive officer of the geoinformation group. gp your company appears to occupy a rather unusual position within the industry. it depends very heavily on aerial photography, yet it does not own or operate its own aircraft and cameras. nor judging from the coverage diagrams displayed on its web site is your company in the business of generating national coverage and offering commodity aerial photography for sale to the general public. at the same time, it does not appear to compete with the big photogrammetric mapping companies in the generation of high-accuracy topographic base maps at large scales for national mapping agencies or engineering applications. please set out your particular position in the overall market for aerial photography and the products that can be derived from it. sc when we started up as a company, digital aerial imagery was very new, very innovative and, as a result, it commanded high prices. changing technology and increased competition led very quickly to the basic aerial image databases becoming very much a commodity. today very few organisations pay anything like the cost of creating the aerial imagery, so companies rely on making multiple sales of each pixel. we recognised this early on. in fact, coming out of a publishing background where the business model is low sales price and high sales numbers, we were early advocates of this model. we have continued to adhere to this model for our imagery archive. we select those areas with the highest potential number of clients because these will give the greatest return. however, in the last eight years, we have also recognised that imagery alone is of limited value. the picture is important; it gives context to map data, but users really need the valuable information that is stored within the image. this information can be extracted in a way that provides ready answers to the questions that they have to address. as a result, we now publish a series of derived products that draw mainly on the imagery as their source but also involve other data like lidar and may involve a significant amount of fieldwork. these datasets include creating new base mapping; land use mapping; the collection of information about residential building age and type; and height models for urban areas. over the past few years, we have gained a unique experience in compiling these datasets and now probably have one of the largest photo interpretation teams outside of the military. gp in an article published recently in a local (cambridge) newspaper, it was reported that you had 22 people working in your headquarters office in cambridge, with a further 45 staff in a production centre in south africa and up to 50 people working on your behalf in india. (a) how is the work split up between these different locations? does each specialize in a particular type of work? (b) with a substantial portion of the work being undertaken in overseas locations far from your company s headquarters, does this result in a good deal of effort being devoted to the quality control of the resulting data? sc we have developed a number of different teams to support the various production processes needed to create our wide range of spatial products. each location specialises in different activities that feed back to the project managers and qa staff in the uk. for example, the indian staff is very good at digitising and creating elevation models april/may 2009 42
Powered by fluidbook tm