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this area makes this campus an ideal
environment for LIS/GIS students and
scholars as it provides the multi
disciplinary perspective required for a
fuller interdisciplinary understanding of
this area of study. .
Interdepartmental cooperation is achieved
through an informal faculty committee
which meets regularly to discuss course
sequencing, course content, joint courses,
cooperative research and other matters of
mutual concern. Most of the faculty on
this committee have courtesy
appointments in other departments. This
acts as a means of formalizing the close
ties of the LIS/GIS faculty v/hich paves
the way for further interdepartmental
cooperation.
Another unusual and valuable resource at
OSU is the Center for Mapping.
Established in June 1986, the Center’s
goal is to promote and facilitate
interdisciplinary research primarily in the
areas of land and resource information
science, digital mapping, and remote
sensing applications (Bossier and Mueller
1987). The Center acts as a research arm
to many of the LIS/GIS faculty on
campus, and it has been particularly
successful in promoting research part
nerships between faculty and private
industry through one of its major
sub-units, the NASA-sponsored Center
for the Commercial Development of Space
(CCDS). Most of the OSU departments
involved in LIS/GIS are linked to the
Center for Mapping and other major
campus computing resources via a
high-speed, fiber optics network
Machines on the net which are currently
utilized include a VAX 8530 operated by
the Center for Mapping (supporting ARC/
INFO, ERDAS, SYNERCOM, INTER
GRAPH), various IBM mainframes, and
a CRAY Y/MP8-64 supercomputer.
LIS/GIS in the Department of
Geodetic Science and Surveying
The Department of Geodetic Science and
Surveying (GSS) offers several programs
in the general area of LIS/GIS, both at the
undergraduate and graduate levels
Besides the undergraduate program in
Surveying, the Department now offers a
B.S. in Mapping and Land Information
Science. As the name suggests, this
program focuses on various aspects of
mapping, LIS, GIS, and database
management.
At the graduate level four areas of
specialization are available to the
student—land information management,
mapping, photogrammetery and geodesy.
The land information management and
mapping programs have a strong focus
on LIS/GIS.
Laboratory Facilities. The Depart
ment has three well equipped
laboratories, one for supporting
photo gramme trie activities and the other
two for supporting LIS/GIS research and
teaching. One of these is devoted almost
entirely to teaching and holds twelve IBM
PS/2 computers linked to various
plotters, printers and digitizers. The
second LIS/GIS laboratory is developing
into a workstation laboratory. At present
it holds IBM-RT and Silicon Graphics
workstations, with additional Intergraph
and other workstations expected in the
near future. Students have access to
various GIS packages, including
GEOVISION, PC-ARC/INFO, ULTI-
MAP, OSU-Map-for-the-PC, and
IDRISI, as well as various mapping,
facilities management, database manage
ment systems (Oracle, DBase) and CAD
software. Several of the faculty and staff
use-Macintosh computers linked on a
local area network (LAN) and there is
also a Macintosh teaching laboratory on
campus.
Graduate Program in Land
Information Management. The land
information management (LIM) program,
created in 1988, builds on the
Department’s traditional strengths in
mapping, photograminetry and geodesy
and offers a diversified set of courses
from both within and outside the
Department. This program was designed
with the following basic philosophical
beliefs in mind:
• LIM professionals must be educated to
enable them to play a leading role in the
management of land information within
an expanding information society;
• the future LIM professional must be
capable of participating in a multidiscip
linary team environment and should
therefore have an understanding of the
perspectives and approaches of other
disciplines in LIS/GIS;
• measurement scientists (surveyors,
geodesists, photogrammetrists, etc.)
