International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B6. Istanbul 2004 
We see also a rapid transformation of the professional groups involved in this market. There were the 
professional mapmakers, i.e. geodesists, cartographers, surveyors and photogrammetrists. Then in the 
seventies and eighties a remote sensing and GIS community evolved which consisted in the early days 
of interested experts from other fields and pioneering amateurs who obtained their skills by training 
and through experience. Nowadays the gi-community consists increasingly of highly educated 
professionals. These professionals can be divided in three major groups: 
| Experts in the field of spatial information handling (or specialists in certain aspects of this field), 
2 Users of geo-information and 
3 Professionals and policy makers, who are aware of the importance of geo-information for Civil 
Society. 
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Figure 1 - The structure of geo-information production processes. 
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a. 
These three types of professionals each play their own role in processes for geo-information provision 
and these processes should be seen from two angles: 
a) The structure of processes for geo-information production with the stages of data 
acquisition, storage and retrieval, processing and presentation and dissemination and use. 
See Figure 1. 
b) These processes can be seen in different contexts. EuroSDR traditionally looks at it in the 
context of the applied technology with the aspects of sensor systems for data acquisition, 
the systems and methods for information extraction from images and the systems and 
methods for information storage and retrieval and dissemination. But these information 
production processes can also be seen in the context of the application domains. These 
cover a wide variety of fields, such as land registration and administration, natural resources 
management, disaster mitigation, etc. Other contexts are the information flow management 
with its organisational aspects and also the institutional and policy issues. 
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