Case Study

Land Parcel Identification System Serves
Farmers Efficiently
The agricultural policy in the European Union (EU)involves one of the biggest financial transactionsin their annual budget. This calls for a careful andprecise registration of those farmers eligible to receive
subsidies, plus the amount they are entitled to. In orderto make this registration work smoothly, a Land Parcel

Identification System (LPIS) has been designed. Eachcountry in the European Union manages and operates
their own LPIS. For the Netherlands, this is done by theMinistry of Economic Affairs and Climate, which includes
the former Ministry of Agriculture.

...On top of the gain in speed andstability, data management wassignificantly reduced, as well as theamount of storage space required.

Furthermore, testing could begin almost immediately afterinstallation. After implementation, the imagery appeared onscreen faster than the vectors, which had never been thecase before.

Constrained Declaration Time Period Creates
Surge in Applications
Each year, all current farmers in the Netherlands,
approximately 60,000, must log into the system to declarewhich parcels they have used, what they have grown and,if needed, modify their parcel boundaries. The declaration
period is constrained to six weeks, and many farmers wait
until the last weekend to submit their data. This results inpeak usage in these final days. In order to properly respondto this surge, the application must be fast and reliable at
all times. The system supporting LPIS in the Netherlands
was initially conceived in 2008, and involved a complex
architecture of federated databases and geospatial servers.
Keeping up performance and reliability was a challenge,
especially at peak times, with a large part of the load comingfrom the underlying imagery data. This is why the Ministry
approached IMAGEM, platinum partner of Hexagon’s
Geospatial division in the Benelux region.

Imagery Service Operational in 1.5 Hours
Putting in place a powerful imagery service based on ERDASAPOLLO was something IMAGEM has done on many occasions.
In this case, the additional challenge was to implement within
an existing architecture based on Esri technology. With noroom to modify front end or back end architecture, the solution
needed to slide neatly into place, and it needed to be done fast.
When the order came in, there was a mere four weeks until thestart of the submission period.
Upon arriving onsite, the base system was made operational
within 1.5 hours. The ability for ERDAS APOLLO to deploy anative Esri Geoservices protocol meant the front-end could
directly take in the new service, without recoding.

Orthomosaic image of the Netherlands

Performing Under Pressure
When the system went into production and farmers began
submitting, the solution proved not only to be very fast, butalso much more stable than the previous architecture. Even atpeak times, with over 8 million page views and 100 GB of data
being requested each hour, CPU’s would not exceed even 25
percent of their maximum load.

Image Compression Results in Faster, Efficient
Delivery
Furthermore, the data was now coming from a few large ECW
mosaic images of the country of the Netherlands, which
replaced the previous, less-efficient solution that deliveredoriginal, full-size imagery from a database. This meant thaton top of the gain in speed and stability, data management
was significantly reduced, as well as the amount of storage
space required.
These few large ECW mosaic images were created from over
87,000 original images of the country of the Netherlands,
about 13 Terabytes of data. The compressed ECW mosaicimages, about 700 Gb in size, have a spatial resolution of 10
cm per pixel Ground Sampling Distance.

Over 87,000 original images of the Netherlands, about 13 Terabytes of data, were compressed
into a single image of 700 Gigabyte file size, displaying 75 million hectares in 10 cm resolution.

Imagery that is compressed into ECW format results in a muchsmaller single file that can be stored, sent, and displayedeven on small devices. ECW technology provides exceptionalcompression, capable of reducing terabyte-sized files to five
percent of their original size, while retaining the image’s fullvisual quality. ECW and JPEG2000 imagery can be streamed
efficiently over networks using ECW Protocol.
In conclusion, the Ministry is very satisfied with the solution
and the ease with which it was implemented. Furthermore,this successful LPIS implementation paves the way to makeuse of this architecture for other systems as well.
It also proves that adopting a combined, ‘best of breed’ approach
to your system architecture many times yields a better return on
investment than standardizing on a single platform.

Contact us
https://go.hexagongeospatial.com/contact-us-today

Land Parcel Identification System Serves Farmers Efficiently

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