Geographic Information Systems/National Elevation Data Route Mileage Verification
Publication: Journal of Surveying Engineering
Volume 132, Issue 1
Abstract
Maintaining the nation’s roads and highways is a critical national infrastructure activity. To do so requires that accurate inventories of roadway features as well as the roadway network itself be maintained. This paper addresses the accuracy of road network mileages, that is, the lengths of various road segments and routes. A study was conducted using Geographic Information Systems to determine the accuracy of using national elevation data (NED) to calculate these lengths. The advantage of doing so is that, if successful, costly and time consuming field studies could be eliminated or reduced. This savings could positively impact all State Departments of Transportation. The scope of the study includes interstate roads as well as all other road types including secondary roads. The primary contribution of the paper is its finding that using NED data provides significant advantages over field studies and provides a very acceptable accuracy level. It also identifies areas of questionable accuracy and indicates why. Additionally, the paper provides some insight into secondary road data which is an often neglected area.
Get full access to this article
View all available purchase options and get full access to this article.
References
Adams, M. T., Malaikrisanachalee, S., Blazquez, C., Lueck, S., and Vonderohe, A. (2002). “Enterprise-wide data integration and analysis for oversize/overweight permitting.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 16(1), 11–22.
Anderson, J. M., and Mikhail, E. M. (1998). Surveying theory and practice, 7th Ed., Chap. 13, WCB/McGraw–Hill, New York, 742–779.
Burrough, P. A., and McDonnell, R. A. (1998). Principles of geographic information system, Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K.
Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI). (2003). “Glossary of GIS terms.” ⟨http://www.esri.com/library/glossary/glossary.html⟩ (May 7, 2003).
Hummer, J., Karimi, H. A., and Khattak, A. (2000). “Collection and presentation of roadway and inventory data.” NCHRP Rep. No. 437, National Academy Press, Transportation Research Board, Washington, D.C.
Karimi, H. A., Liu, X., Liu, S., and Hommad, A. (2004). “GPS loc: Framework for predicting global positioning system quality of service.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 18(3), 196–206.
Rasdorf, W., and Cai, H. (2001). “A GIS data quality case study:Accuracy comparison of length measurements using GIS/NED and DMI.” Technical Rep., North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, N.C.
Rasdorf, W., Cai, H., Tilley, C., Brun, S., Karimi, H., and Robson, F. (2003). “Transportation distance measurement data quality.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 17(2), 75–87.
Rasdorf, W., Cai, H., Tilley, C., Brun, S., and Robson, F. (2004). “Accuracy assessment of interstate highway length measurement using DEM.” J. Surv. Eng., 130(3), 142–150.
Rasdorf, W., Janisch, A., Robson, F., and Tilley C. (2002). “Testing and evaluating alternative algorithms for location referencing system route generation.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 16(3), 194–205.
USGS National Elevation Dataset. (2001). ⟨http://gisdata.usgs.net/ned/⟩ (May 26, 2001).
Yanalak, M. (2003). “Effect of gridding method on digital terrain model profile data based on scattered data.” J. Comput. Civ. Eng., 17(1), 58–67.
Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Copyright
© 2006 ASCE.
History
Received: Sep 23, 2003
Accepted: Jan 21, 2005
Published online: Feb 1, 2006
Published in print: Feb 2006
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Citations
Download citation
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.