Carolin Werthmann explains how SpaceDatists uses digital data processing to support its customers in land management, the assessment of terrain characteristics and the interpretation of vegetation and topography from a distance.
Start-up founders Jakob Kopec and Florian Spieß want to support local authorities and planning offices with digitalization. They do this by collecting data based on satellite images and aerial photographs and then passing it on to their customers. Carolin Werthmann explains how SpaceDatists uses digital data processing to support its customers with land management, the assessment of terrain characteristics and the interpretation of vegetation and topography from a distance.
Jakob Kopec starts his working day early, sitting at his desk in Dortmund at seven o’clock and expecting a call for an interview at eight. Unfortunately, he can’t meet in person because of coronavirus. He is caught working from home, like so many people these days, but apart from that, not much has changed for him and his start-up SpaceDatists despite the crisis. Business as usual. They have always been digital, so they are prepared for such situations.
SpaceDatists and its two managing directors, Kopec and his colleague Florian Spieß, have been the Ruhr region’s specialists for spatial information processing and modeling for almost two years. Kopec and Spieß collect data based on satellite images and aerial photographs, combine it with the planning and development rights available to them as well as further geoinformation and pass it on to local authorities or customers from the private sector in order to optimize their green space management, building gap monitoring and residential and commercial development. The two founders describe what they do as “refining information” and its “innovative processing”. Sounds cryptic at first.
Take green spaces, for example. SpaceDatists not only have information about where vegetation is located, they can also say which plants are involved, whether there are slopes or gradients on the site and what degree of incline is to be expected. Kopec and Spieß make significant use of freely accessible raw data from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The NRW Open Data Initiative has existed since 2017, providing geoinformation that used to cost money to obtain. What you can find there are historical aerial images, current aerial images, 3D models, surface models, road data and property information.
In many other federal states, people still pay for this. This is why Kopec and Spieß highly value the Ruhr region as a company location. “We can test products and developments here without having to invest a lot in our own data generation,” explains Kopec. However, this in turn limits their nationwide agility and initially makes them dependent on projects in their own federal state. Which is not such a bad thing. Because Kopec believes that it won’t be long before open data initiatives also arrive in other German federal states. And things are going well for the start-up at the moment. Could they have their own drones to be more flexible? “We tried it out once, also in collaboration with other start-ups,” answers Kopec. “But we prefer to use official geodata from the state or city, because we can rely on the data being verified.”
“Urban and spatial planners like blocks, paper and pen.”
The launch of the NRW Open Data Initiative in 2017 coincided remarkably closely with the founding of the company. No coincidence. Kopec says there is definitely a connection. It was even the main trigger for the start of SpaceDatists. It started in May 2018. Although the concept had actually been hanging in the air much earlier and was waiting to be implemented. At the time, Kopec and Spieß were research assistants at the Faculty of Spatial Planning at the Technical University of Dortmund; they are trained spatial planners themselves and focused on geodata applications in their research and teaching. The evolution of their business idea, which had already matured at university, followed on seamlessly from their time at university.
They are still based at the TechnologieZentrumDortmund, where the proximity to the university and students not only helps to attract Bachelor’s and Master’s graduates for projects, but also to get support from colleagues and scientists. “We knew how to work with data and what you can do with it and realized that there is a big market behind it,” says Jakob Kopec. “We also realized that there is still very little digital work being done in the industry. Urban and spatial planners like blocks, pen and paper.” He wants to use the start-up to support local authorities with digitalization. “That doesn’t mean that local authorities are in a bad position, many even have very good data information systems. It’s just that they reach their limits when it comes to using them and often don’t know what can be done with them beyond the tried and tested.”
Kopec and Spieß can be described as analysts, but also as consultants, developers and service providers for something that often has no place in the everyday lives of many urban and spatial planners: digital data processing. They and their clients hope that this will bring added value for land management, land use, the evaluation of terrain characteristics and the interpretation of vegetation and topography from a distance.
Searching for gaps between buildings and brownfield sites
Evaluation algorithms help you to optimize municipal land management. The algorithms are trained to recognize where there is development potential in urban areas without having to designate new development areas. “Metropolitan areas are under high development pressure and have less and less space and land available,” says Kopec. “We are looking for gaps between buildings or brownfield sites, old industrial locations that have not been developed for years. In combination with property information and historical aerial photographs, we can evaluate where these areas are.” This also answers the question of the possible multiple use of areas. Depending on which area the SpaceDatists come across, they have to deal with certain characteristics. They collect information on landscape and nature conservation requirements, contaminated sites and planning law. “From this, we can deduce what subsequent development is possible. Whether commercial and office space is conceivable or perhaps better apartments or interim uses such as refugee accommodation.”
Planning as a binding standard
The XPlanung data exchange format, which the IT Planning Council defined in 2017 as a binding standard for the loss-free exchange of urban land-use plans, spatial development plans and landscape plans between different IT systems of planning offices, authorities, neighboring municipalities and real estate developers, is used to exchange all of this information. The format enables the cross-plan evaluation and visualization of plan content. “This is where we help out and support both local authorities and planning offices,” comments Kopec.
SpaceDatists is currently testing the generation of urban planning scenarios for smart cities on the basis of such digital urban land-use plans, which are fully semantic and vector-based. They create 3D models depending on the existing planning law. If the development plan states that two to three-storey semi-detached houses are planned, Kopec and Spieß can use this information to simulate what would happen if there were ten houses instead of six, or how many households could be accommodated and under what conditions.
SpaceDatists creates an interface
“What we envisage is developing a platform on which every player can display their development plans and analyze them independently,” answers Kopec when asked what he can imagine his company realizing in the future outside of its current field of activity. “We would like to offer these 3D scenarios that we are developing as a service. Everyone uploads their plan to the platform and everyone can test out different scenarios for spaces.” This is because the interface from the vision to the project-oriented model is still missing in many places.
It is also this interface that would be missing if SpaceDatists did not exist, says Kopec. They always come into play when it comes to understanding the relationship between planning and the question of how digital products with added value can be created from it.
