9. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 
After over 20 years of essentially separate 
development, remote sensing applications are 
beginning to recognise the advantages of 
integrating GIS datasets into image analysis. 
The integration of remote sensing and GIS has 
been the subject of one of the National Centre 
for Geographic Information and Analysis 
(NCGIA) research initiatives (Star et al, 1991). 
This has concentrated on topics such as data 
structures, parallel processing hardware 
environments and error analysis. Meanwhile, 
users attempting to integrate remote sensing 
with GIS have struggled on with inappropriate 
software, converting formats and 'integrating' 
data by displaying datasets on the same screen. 
The real advancements in the integration of 
remote sensing and GIS can only come with 
the development of integrated software 
environments where the display, interrogation, 
processing and analysis of raster and vector 
datasets is part of the underlying system 
design. A part of this process will be the 
definition of the processing functions that are 
needed to integrate data. This development 
process is underway at Laser-Scan where an 
object oriented GIS has been developed which 
integrates the display and analysis of vector, 
raster, DTM, remotely sensed and non-spatial 
data. 
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Faust, N.L., Anderson, W.H. and Star, J.L., 
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