Abstract: The Global Positioning System, shortened in the acronym GPS, is a quite familiar tool, more or less secretly working into our car navigators and smartphones/tablets, and continuously used together with a cartographic information in order to find and move to places of our interest.
GPS and cartography, which are now pervading our life, give us the opportunity to taste a discipline traditionally called Geodesy, as ancient as the famous Alessandria Library, continuously renovated over centuries and dramatically boosted again in the era of the artificial satellites, and now being the noble root of a new discipline called Geomatics. GPS plays a central role in science and technology too, and now it can supply valuable information for civil protection against a number of natural hazards, including tsunamis. In this respect, the Positioning Group at the Geodesy and Geomatics Division faced a scientific and technological challenge launched in 2007, in the frame of a long scientific debate started after the great Sumatra-Andaman Islands earthquake (December 26, 2004, Magnitude 9.1), and invented an algorithm called VADASE, nationally and internationally patented by Sapienza.
VADASE transforms GPS in a seismograph, contributing to evaluate, in real-time and in 3D, the ground shaking style induced by an earthquake, crucial to understand if a devastating tsunami can be generated.
Recently (September 2, 2015) VADASE became an industrial product, after a long cooperation and a formal agreement between Sapienza and Leica Geosystems AG, a Swiss company worldwide leader in Geomatics and GPS manufacturing. The aim of the speech is just to recall VADASE story, out of technicalities, and to draw future research and technology transfer prospects.

Are you curious about VADASE? Please browse www.vadase.eu

And about Geomatics? Take the benefit for a review on Geomatics of the open access to Geodesy and Geomatics: the cutting edge - Rendiconti Lincei