Southern Mapping Company Pty Ltd, or SMC, was formed on 1 December 2006 with the aim of providing aerial Lidar surveys to clients worldwide. SMC forms a watershed in the history of survey in Africa, as it becomes the first independently owned Lidar company based on the continent.

Our philosophy is to provide our clients with rapidly delivered mapping of the highest quality, in all areas.

Nature of Business

SMC provides topographic surveys and mapping for a variety of industries and sectors. These include civil engineering and infrastructure development, mineral exploration and mine management, environmental planning and rehabilitation, and urban and agricultural planning.  The accuracy of these surveys varies according to client requirements, with specifications ranging from 2m contours all the way down to 25cm contours. Image resolution similarly ranges from 50cm to 5cm.

Company Structure

The company is a limited liability private company, registered in South Africa.  It is 95% owned by the founders, with the remaining 5% held by Denis Kennedy, CA(SA).

SMC has a board of four directors, and a total staff complement of ten.

We are in talks with potential BEE partners and expect to be able to make an announcement in this regard in the second quarter of 2007.

Products

Both the accuracy and the image resolution are a direct function of flying height. Some sample options are presented in the table below:

SMC produces two main outputs.

·         The orthoimage

This is used as a layer in a CAD or GIS, to provide the visual information.  In a built environment it shows the size and location of man-made objects such as roads, buildings, pipe and power lines, excavations and stockpiles, etc.  In other situations it highlights stands of different vegetation types, shows degraded or eroded areas,provides locations and extents of water bodies, etc. etc.

·         The terrain model

This can be delivered as simple ground and non-ground sets of files. Alternatively the above ground data can be further classified to extract such information as power lines, buildings, trees, etc.  This data is used for a multitude of purposes.  It can be used for the design of new roads, or power lines.  A mine manager can use it to determine or verify the volume of rock moved out of his pits and onto his stockpiles.  If an extension is required for the mine, the terrain model can be used to plan this.  The ideal site for a proposed dam can be located using the terrain model, and then the inundation area can be determined, the disaster plan can be compiled by plotting the path of the water in the event of a dam break and pipeline routes from the dam to a target are can also be optimised

Badly eroded areas or poorly constructed stockpiles are difficult to survey by conventional means.  However a dense Lidar survey easily gathers enough points to accurately model these areas and mitigation measures can be designed.

Above ground data can be used to determine the extent of trees to be cleared for a new power line route, and the impact of other power lines that cross the new route. By importing the power line strikes into a power line modelling package, an existing line can be optimised for increased power flow.  In a telecoms planning application, separated building and vegetation classes can be used to model the propagation of radio waves in an urban area.

Other value added outputs that can be supplied include:

·         Contour data

·         Volumes of potential inundation areas for dams and pits and stockpiles on mines

·         Detail mapping

·         Paper plots

·         3D models, both physical and digital