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The society continues to operate its Special Interest 
Groups in Education, GIS, Geology, Field Spectroscopy 
and Ocean Colour. This has recently been augmented by 
two new groups: in Archaeology and SAR. The official 
publication of the Society is the International Journal of 
Remote Sensing, currently running at 18 issues per year, 
and it also publishes a quarterly Newsletter, an annual 
report and occasional monographs. The Society operates 
an electronic bulletin board containing general information 
and notes on opportunities relevant to remote sensing. A 
number of awards are given by the Society ranging from 
the Remote Sensing Society Award and Gold Medal for 
distinguished achievement in remote sensing to travel 
bursaries and support for research in progress. The major 
event is the Annual Conference at which the Annual 
General Meeting of the Society is held. Other one and 
two day meetings and workshops are held, often run by 
the Special Interest Groups and in conjunction with other 
Societies. 
The Society has a large overseas membership and seeks 
to cater for the needs of these members by promoting 
their research and providing a forum for the exchange of 
expertise and knowledge. The Society also continues to 
develop its links with other Societies both within the UK 
and abroad, including the Photogrammetric Society, the 
Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and.the French 
Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (with 
whom a successful joint conference was held in 1994) 
and the Dutch RS and Photogrammetric Societies. In 
addition to these activities, the Society also works in 
collaboration with the European Association of Remote 
Sensing Laboratories (EARSeL) and has been officially 
represented at a number of meetings of other overseas 
societies. 
The Remote Sensing and Photogrammetric Societies still 
remain entirely distinct in the UK although members 
continue to enjoy the reciprocal benefits of preferential 
registration rates at society events. Analysis of the 
membership lists of the two societies shows only a small 
overlap of individual members (mainly from education 
establishments) or of corporate members (mainly from 
government institutions). 
The Survey & Mapping Alliance (SMA), formed in 1989, 
was wound up in 1994, following the fourth UK national 
Survey and Mapping conference in 1993, but most of the 
participating societies and institutions of SMA, including 
the Photogrammetric Society, recombined in November 
1994 to form the Survey & Mapping special interest group 
of the Association of Geographic Information (AGI), which 
holds an annual conference and exhibition. 
NAPLIB continues as an independent but small 
organisation promoting the use and preservation of aerial 
photographs. Its Directory of Aerial Photographic 
Collections in the UK published in 1993 is the best single 
Source of information on 372 collections, and work on a 
second edition is in progress. 
International Archives of Photogrammetry and 
      
  
  
  
   
   
      
    
     
   
  
1.1 Types of organisations 
The private sector accounts for over half the 
organisations involved in photogrammetry and remote 
sensing and educational establishments account for 
about a quarter of the total (Table 1.1). Government- 
funded organisations account for the balance (17%). 
These figures are based on the questionnaire returns, 
which include all the larger organisations with 
photogrammetric and/or remote sensing activities. For 
smaller private and education organisations, the remote 
sensing returns are thought to be under-representative. 
TABLE 1.1 Organisation by type and activities: 
  
Photogram R.S. Both Totals 
  
  
Government 3 6 8 17 
funded 
Private 26 20 7 53 
Education and 6 15 7 28 
non-profit 
Totals 35 41 22 98 
  
  
  
  
  
   
      
   
    
    
  
2.PHOTOGRAMMETRY 
This section of the report is sourced from corporate and 
individual membership of the Photogrammetric Society. In 
the United Kingdom photogrammetry continues to be a 
specialist scientific operation employing only a few 
hundred persons in total. Realistic figures are difficult to 
assemble because most persons working in 
photogrammetry do so as a component of a larger 
discipline. For example, lecturers in tertiary education will 
frequently teach photogrammetry within topographic or 
cartographic science; and experts in such technical fields 
as archaeology, architecture, civil engineering and 
medicine may use photogrammetry as a small component 
of their data capture and analysis. 
The developing merger between photogrammetry, remote 
sensing, automated cartography and geographical 
information systems (GIS) also makes it difficult to identify 
photogrammetrists as members of an independent 
profession. The spectacular increase in the use of PCs 
and workstations as a tool in laboratory measurement 
and analysis has aided the move towards digital 
photogrammetry and compounded the integration of 
photogrammetry within the general subject of mapping 
science. While the term geomatics has not established 
itself in the UK, the term photogrammetry does not fully 
represent the subject that some former 
photogrammetrists are now engaged upon. 
The questionnaire returns illustrated the problems of 
distinguishing photogrammetric and remote sensing 
operations from each other and from the broader area of 
spatial science. It was noted that the returns of many 
questionnaires sent to organisations thought of as 
photogrammetry-orientated showed both 
photogrammetric and remote sensing activities, whereas 
the questionnaires sent to organisations thought of as 
remote-sensing orientated sometimes also showed 
photogrammetric activity. 
87 
Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXI, Part B6. Vienna 1996