linked to elements of the topography.
Parallel with this change we saw the development of Doppler and GPS
technology, digital photogrammetry, topographic database building, automated
topographic cartography, and the evolution of a multitude of media for the
distribution of topographic and geographic information. Gradually we entered a
world of capabilities for positioning without surveyors, photogrammetry without
photogrammetrists and cartographic processes without cartographers. But the
same technological evolution made the integration of these individual specializa
tions possible. When the remote sensing and photogrammetry technology can be
such that the actual technical skills can be imbedded in software then we arrive
at a situation where these skills are getting into the hands of the information
users, i.e. an agricultural or forestry scientist can use digital photogrammetry
without having to study photogrammetry at great lengths. Digitally rectified
stereo images can be inspected and for example forest or soil polygons can be
identified and digitized so that a database of this information can be created or
maintained for any particular purpose. The content before or after analytical
processing can be output in maps automatically. Where does positioning end and
cartography begin in such an integrated process? Who is the positioner and who
the cartographer? In the way of publishing geographic information, the
conventional paper product can now be complemented with digital video, CD
ROM, in a PC or MAC environment, or as microfiche of a quality of resolution
in which the screen of the original maps can in fact be detected.
This integration of the elements of the surveying and map production process and
the shift of technical capabilities from the conventional specialist to the creator
and user of information is no different from what has happened in general
publishing and will have at least as far reaching consequences on producers,
authors, and users of mapped information and the organizations in which they
work. "Marshall McLuhan used to remark,"Gutenberg made everybody a reader.
Xerox made everybody a publisher." But personal computers made everybody an
author. Electronic-mail, wordprocessing programs together with laser printers
collapse the whole writing-publishing-distribution process into one event
controlled entirely by the individual"(3).
All of this will of course have major implications for the policies of national
mapping agencies. For example, the way they see their mission, standard products
and tasks and how they are being organized to fulfil those (4). Similarly
education institutions will be affected (5). But it also raises the question how we
can objectively discuss and set priorities in this integrated electronic GIS
environment without some kind of consistent model of the properties and the
structure of geographic information, its capture, its use etcetera. The discipline
that addresses these issues in a systematic and scientific way is Geomatics. At the
same time as this concept was beginning to be formulated it was recognized that
another consequence of the fact that we work in electronic environments needed
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