Automatic GIS data capture and conversion
Neil Flanagan, Cullen Jennings, Colin Flanagan · Innovations in GIS · 2024
The majority of recent engineering diagrams and maps are produced by CAD or GIS systems. Processing the data in these documents in electronic form provides substantially more flexibility than paper affords, allowing updates to a document to be easily reproduced, or documents to be combined or have additions made to them. For instance, from a utility company’s GIS system a user could determine the location of the house nearest to a river where a chemical spill occurred. From CAD electrical diagrams a computer simulation of the circuit being designed might be created. Because electronic forms are easy to archive and update, they are valuable media for document storage. Although new documents are often drafted and stored in an electronic format, many existing documents survive only on deteriorating paper. During the early 1980s many companies attempted to scan these documents and convert them automatically into an electronic format. Scanning and converting these documents has turned out to be a very challenging problem, so that currently most conversion is done by using digitizing boards to re-draft the documents into a CAD or GIS system.