O. Siman Tov’s scientific contributions

The state of Israel is a small country, in terms of area, with one the higher population growth rate among all the OECD countries. Hence, each year more than 50,000 housing units built and more than 1,500 km roads constructed in average, each year along the last decade.The Survey of Israel )SOI( is a National Mapping and Cadastral agency (NMCA) that holds the responsibility to update, maintain and disseminate the National Topographic Data Base (NTDB) to all of the governmental offices and municipalities, to utilize, plan and promote the construction of the public needs.Today, the reality is dynamic and the changes occurs every day, therefore, the users expect that the existing database will portray the current reality as possible. In order to address the user's requirements for rapid updating rate, the Survey of Israel promote a new and modern initiatives, including:Promote the cooperation and working relationship with the municipalities to rapidly update the streets, address and POI’s.Data Fusion from different governmental and municipalities data sources.Developing change detection techniques to update the buildings and roads layers.Developing new frameworks for the manual inspection and QA/QC procedures.Developing automatic tools to update the height component via high resolution DSM and DTM (50cm GSD).Disseminate quarterly the NTDB products to the users.Develop a modern processes management system for the update and QA workflowIn this article, we will demonstrate the initiatives and techniques that improved our NTDB updating rate to less than a year and a half in a national average.

Digital camera systems are a key component in the production of reliable, geometrically accurate, high-resolution geospatial products in a national scale. These systems have replaced film imaging in photogrammetric data capturing. Today, we are witnessing a proliferation of imaging sensors, collecting images in different ground resolutions, spectral bands, swath sizes, radiometric characteristics and accuracies being carried on varied mobile platforms. In addition, these imaging sensors combined with navigational tools (such as GPS and IMU), active sensors such as laser scanning and powerful processing tools, to obtain high quality geospatial products. The quality of these geospatial products based on the utilization of calibrated, high-quality digital camera systems.The new Survey of Israel (SOI) regulations specify the quality requirements for each geospatial product including maps at different scales and for different purposes, elevation models, ortho imagery etc. In addition, the regulations require that digital camera systems utilized for mapping purposes should be certified, using a rigorous mapping systems certification and validation process, which are specified in the SOI Director General Instructions (DGI).In 2019 the SOI has updated the camera certification and validation procedure and published a new national aerial capturing standard for digital geospatial products as a basis for the public bid in three main fields:Aerial data capturing including ground control points (GCP) measurements and aerial triangulation.Ortho imagery in several ground resolution distance (GSD) and several projections.Digital Elevation models including: points clouds, Digital Surface Model (DSM) and Digital Terrain Model (DTM). This article provides the details of the Israeli Directive for camera certification and Standard for digital geospatial products including the main technical requirements of the public bid that was carried out.