PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | March 14, 2003
Proc. SPIE. 4886, Remote Sensing for Environmental Monitoring, GIS Applications, and Geology II
KEYWORDS: Human-machine interfaces, Roads, Agriculture, Visualization, Satellites, Satellite imaging, Geographic information systems, Raster graphics, Climatology, Earth observing sensors
Almeria, holding the only dessert area of continental Europe, is a semiarid province located southeast the Iberian Peninsula. The development status of the different counties of the province is widely different. Near the coast, greenhouse growing and tourism have
generated an extremely active economic area. On the other side, inner areas of the province have gone down economically, with the reduction of mining and classic grows. In order to analyze new development alternatives, we built ESTIARA-Sig for the Ministry of Agriculture of Andalusia; our main objective developing this GIS was to catalog the different resources of the whole province to support development decisions. It includes four types of information: a) alphanumeric data (36 groups/tables, relative to statistics and resources), b) vectorial data (including the cartography), c) raster geographical data (obtained from satellite images, they let us to differentiate specifically greenhouse growing, populated and other areas), and d) photographic images (including types of constructions or special
locations). A dynamic user interface was added to facilitate its use. In this work, we present main characteristics of the system and analyze their use along last six years, presenting as conclusions the experience obtained in order to develop a new version.
