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treasury, they should at least negotiate
budget increases comparable with their
revenue earnings.
- NMA’s must strive to retain government
funding for their core tasks (maintenance of
geodetic network; establishment and main-
tenance of national topo maps/data bases;
etc.) by demonstrating that these tasks
fulfil a national need and therefore require
funding. However, since limits will be
imposed on this funding, NMA’s must strive
to reduce the costs of their core opera-
tions; to improve the quality of their
services in all respects, but particularly
timeliness and sensitivity to clients and
undertake work on quantifying the benefits
in providing land and resource information.
- The opportunities to generate extra revenue
through task and product diversification are
tremendous, but demands a thorough market
analysis in order to get to know the cus-
tomer and his needs. Furthermore, given the
fact that the current data requirements far
exceed the available NMA production capacity
and that this situation will probably only
worsen, as the national and world economy
becomes more dependent on information, it
would appear that the future challenge for
NMA’s will be to meet as many of the re-
quirements as possible through both internal
and external means, whereby the latter imply
entering into production co-operation agree-
ments with other government agencies and the
commercial sector.
Product and task diversification opportunities
include:
- establishing a library of aerial photography
and remote sensing imagery and making this
available to the public.
- producing and marketing downstream aerial
photographic products such as uncontrolled
mosaics or photo indexes.
- establishing a library of minor control and
marketing this such that non-specialised
agencies can produce thematic plots using
analytical plotters.
- producing road maps or digital data banks of
road data for car navigation applications,
etc.
- carrying out large-scale digital mapping
programmes. In The Netherlands, such a pro-
gramme is jointly financed by the cadastre,
municipalities and utility companies. Both
standard and customised map products in
terms of coverage and content are produced.
- carrying out all sorts of engineering
surveys.
- assessing the environmental impact of
development proposals.
- controlling pollution by recording the
sources and monitoring the effects.
- identifying risk areas related to natural
hazards such as land slides, avalanches,
floods, etc.
- recording archaeological and other sites of
scientific, historical or cultural interest.
establish consultancy services in surveying,
mapping and GIS's.
etc., etc.
21.
22.
343
With regard to cost effectiveness, it was
recognised that NMA’s have to develop cost
models for all their operations so that
quality and cost can be balanced against the
requirements. Furthermore, producers will have
to carefully analyse user requirements in
order to establish whether these are realistic
or not; users will have to be educated so that
they have a greater appreciation of mapping
costs and cost variations and the producers
will have to use these cost variation figures
in optimising their data collection methods.
An example was given of a cost calculation
whereby plotting costs were found to account
for 95% of the total mapping costs (mapping at
1:1000 in an area with a very high density of
detail). The implication now in planning the
mapping programme is that one can vary the
project parameters to improve and simplify the
mapping process, without substantially in-
creasing the total costs since these are
anyhow largely plotting costs. Examples of
these simplifications are going to smaller and
more convenient block sizes, adding more
ground control than actually required to im-
prove the reliability and using photography at
larger scales than needed and possibly also
colour photography, to improve the inter-
pretability and thereby reduce the field
verification effort needed.
The importance of keeping the maps/data bases
of a National Topo Series up-to-date cannot be
over-emphasised, simply because "mapping is a
deteriorating asset, which will have a long
useful life if properly maintained, but will
lose its value in a very short time if
neglected".
Given that the currency required of digital
data bases is probably in the order of 5-year
revision cycles, it is evident that vays and
means will have to be found to improve the
efficiency of this tremendous task facing
NMA's in the future.
Possibilities include:
- recognising that changes rarely take place
uniformly throughout a data base. The need
thus exists to develop a simple, economic
system for detecting areas of change
- obtain the support of local authorities to
submit information on changes in their area
directly to the NMA
- reduce the NMA revision effort needed by
keeping the National Data Base as simple as
possible in terms of number of data items
and the detaildness of data classification.
Where more detail is needed in data classi-
fication, transfer the responsibility for
data collection and maintenance to the
specialised agency requiring this greater
detail.