ADDRESS OF THE NATIONAL LAND SURVEY OF FINLAND 
P. Raitanen 
Deputy Director General 
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen, 
On behalf of the National Land Survey of Finland I have a 
great honour of welcoming you to Finland - and Lapland. You 
are now at the same region, where the French scientist Pierre- 
Luis Moreau de Maupertuis with his colleagues just 250 years 
ago made geodetic measurements to determine the shape of the 
Earth. It reminds us, that the international scientific co- 
Operation has its roots far in the history of the past 
centuries. I hope that the Symposium of Commission III of 
ISPRS in Rovaniemi will create one ring again to the long chain 
of the scientific co-operation between the North and the 
South, the West and the East. 
The theme "From Analytical to Digital" in Photogrammetry and 
Remote Sensing is very actual also here in Finland. We are 
just finalizing a special national program for mapping, 
"Map 2000", in the National Land Survey of Finland. In that 
program we have tried to put more emphasis in the real need 
of the users and more effective use of the scarce resources. 
It means that we must turn the whole process of mapping to 
use more digital information and automation. The end users 
will not any more be satisfied with analogical map sheets on 
aerial photographs. They want to have the aerial and spatial 
information in digital form and directly integrated in their 
own management systems. The Finnish approach in LIS (Land 
Information System) will be based on highly decentralized 
form, where the member organizations should have direct 
access to the other data bases. A large amount of legal and 
technical problems must be solved before a nationwide LIS- 
system is really operational. 
Digitizing all the spatial information is a huge task. 
However, when the users recognize that they can utilize 
digital data sources, they want to use them immediately, 
not in the far future. National mapping organizations will 
have real resource problems to solve. In this connection, 
they should remember an advice which Mr. Asko Oinas, the 
county governor of this Lapland Region, once told us. He 
reminded about a clever reindeer breeding Laplander, who 
meets a mountain in the wilds. If the mountain is too high 
to across, he passes around it. 
We have here in Finland completed the topographic mapping 
in the scale of 1:10 000 - 1:20 000 some 10 years ago. The 
keeping of the map up to date and making of quality improve- 
ments and digitizing the whole process is a large and long 
lasting process. It is like a mountain of the Lapland's 
wilds. So, what to do? One part of the solution will be 
that we are going to produce a completely new topographic 
map 1:50 000. It is a suitable product for many users. 
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