Purpose of this Laboratory

The The Planetary Mapping and GIS laboratory at IAPS-INAF develops projects related to cartography, photogrammetry and Geographic Information System (GIS).

Cartography is the art and science of representing a geographical area of a planetary surface, using cartographic computations to project data into a planar reference system to represent data over a flat surface.

Photogrammetry groups techniques and methods to retrieve spatial information from imagery. Stereophotogrammetry applies photogrammetric rules to verlapping images to extract three dimensional coordinate from bi-dimesional imgery spaces.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been firstly developed for environmental analysis but now are of wide use in Planetary Sciences. GIS manages spatially referenced data and makes uses of relational databases to manage datasets which would be difficult to manage with a file-based approach. GIS are very versatile and can serve to produce interpretative mapping or apply geostatistics computations.