Kuwait: Image Mapping - Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics - page 30

Vector-basedandfield-verifiedlayers
ofdata,fromKuwaitiNationalDatabase,
IntergraphCorp.,1991.
In other words, already before the conclusion of the first Gulf War, the data
and maps that guided the reconstruction of Kuwait were already available. On
another Intergraph poster titled: “Kuwait City: Image Mapping ...the Integration
of Remote Sensing, GIS and Digital Cartography,” the map is explained as com -
posed of two satellite images, taken on July 17, 1987, and August 31, 1990. 15 These
images are shown manipulated and superimposed onto what is called the “Kuwait
National Database,” eight years in the making and completed weeks before the
Iraqi invasion, which correlated the digitized satellite (raster) data with other map-
ping (vector) data, thereby converting it into a map: just in time for the space it
represented to be destroyed by the invading Iraqi army.
The interfaces here are multiple in that this map superimposes data systems
and imaging systems. It keeps the viewer overhead—at hundreds of miles above
the Earth, in two satellites—and on the ground—with tape measures, spread
across years of imaging and data collection—and at the same time in the archive of
a database.
According to a brief account in Armed Forces Journal International , the govern-
ment of Kuwait gave Intergraph permission to distribute the database “to firms
that receive contracts to help rebuild the Mideast nation. The database includes
the location and shape of 145,000 buildings in Kuwait City and complete records
of all roads, bridges, paved areas, and parking lots, as well as all utility, telephone,
and power lines. It even contains the precise location of all of the trees within
Kuwait City prior to Operation Desert Storm. The database, completed by the Jap -
anese firm Mitsui in June 1990, took eight years to complete and cost the Kuwaiti
government $30-million.” 16