Fit-for-purpose conformal mapping for sustainable land administration in war-ravaged Syria

Abstract

Over the last nine years, the ongoing armed conflict in Syria has had a devastating impact on properties and infrastructure, making it necessary to rebuild everything from scratch. As spatial data are a pillar to enhance sustainable socio-economic development, it should be georeferenced and reformed to keep up with the tremendous growth in information and communication technology. On the other hand, the low-distortion conformal mapping contributes significantly to changing the position of any feature on the earth's surface onto a plane to create accurate large-scale spatial data. The current research conducts an analytical study using spatial statistics tools to investigate an optimal conformal projection for representing the Syrian area in a single zone that preserves angles locally, reduces linear distortions, and fulfills modern geospatial technologies' requirements. The findings have shown the applicability of the proposed model as an alternative solution to minimize the scale error over the interest area. In addition, the isograms pattern is close to the shape of the area, and better fits the quality criteria of the chosen projection.