Validation of Regional Positioning Service User Connections as Support in Update Cartography

ABSTRACT The significant demand for highly updated geospatial or cartographic information surpasses the capacity of the official agencies responsible for its generation. The procedure for updating official cartography, in some Spanish regions, can take more than three or 4 years. This long process depends to a large extent on the national planning of aerial flights, but also on actions linked to the updates of changes in their geodatabases. There are alternative non‐cartographic sources of geoinformation that can locate these variations more quickly than waiting for triannual orthophoto generation and reduce these times. This article focusses on a potential option derived from the location of users connections to a regional differential position corrections transmission system in Andalusia (Spain) used by surveyors. Three data selection studies are presented to evaluate this source for the detection of new or altered construction, covering the period 2008–2016. The results show a 95% success rate for new developments, 87% for new linear public works, and 72% for new urban services or facilities, validating its potential usefulness for updating cartography. The main advantages of this source lie in the speed of detection of an area under construction and in the definition of a preliminary boundary. The analysis of temporal statistics from this source, filtered by construction activities, can also be useful in targeting and prioritizing the mapping planning of public agencies and improving the effectiveness of false positive image‐to‐image change detection, reducing the time to update the official cartography.