International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B6. Istanbul 2004 
  
During this decade we witnessed the first PhD degree in 
photogrammetry which issued by Tehran university. Now there 
are 5 graduated people in the field of photogrammetry and 
remote sensing and more than 10 students are working on their 
research topics. Due to appropriate relations with good standing 
universities in the world of Geomatics, it can be stated that the 
qualities of most of these educational programs are compatible 
with international standards. 
As mentioned before most researches in fundamental contexts 
in the field of photogrammetry and remote sensing is carrying 
out by universities during MSC and PHD rescarch period. 
According to the recent development in number of involved 
universities and their students in this field, a good improvement 
in research activities can be observed. As a witness to this 
claim, the number of accepted papers and research reports from 
Iran by national and international scientific conferences and 
journals can be mentioned that exceeded from 30 in number 
during the year 2003. 
Within the past four years, fast development in different fields 
of Geomatics was motivated NCC to increase its cooperation 
with academic centres in order to promote application driven 
researches in them. For better accomplishment of this task, 
NCC established the NCC Research Council which aims to 
define, guide, support, supervise and assess research projects at 
NCC. This council specially promotes research activities which 
improves the accessibility and availability of data for the 
public. One of the major acheivments of NCC in relation with 
Tehran University is the domestic photogrammetry workstation 
which now is fully operational within NCC and many private 
companies. This cooperation resulted in the first R&D private 
company in Iran who is highly active in developing hardware 
and software systems in the field of photogrammetry and 
remote sensing. 
Very recently NCC decided to establish the first Geomatics 
research centre in order to develop its role and presence in the 
research domain. This centre started its activity in the field of 
photogrammetry with a research topic about LIDAR with the 
title of: Comprehensive Evaluation of the Potential of LIDAR 
for 3D Geospatial Data Collection. 
3. CURRENT SITUATION 
3.1 Proposed Strategic Plan and Related Projects 
In 2002, strategic plan for mapping activities in Iran including 
photogrammetry and remote sensing has been proposed by 
NCC to the government. It has been designed to fulfil future 
national requirements in the field of Geomatics. This plan is 
mainly concentrated in the following issues: 
= Training and education; 
« Standardization and documentation of technical procedures; 
= Research and development; 
= Privatization; 
= Developing the applications of spatial information; 
= Revising the legislations in this area. 
Although, the present structure has the technical and 
educational ability to meet today's needs, but due to rapid 
changes in technology and user requirements, a few national 
projects have been planned which some of them in relation to 
this report can be addressed as follows (some of them have 
already begun): 
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= Completion and updating the 1:25000 scale base maps and 
NTDB; 
= Development of national DEM with 10m resolution; 
= Completion and updating large scale digital maps of cities; 
= Production of 1:10000 scale maps of rural areas around 
cities with more than one million population; 
= Development of standards required to fulfil these projects; 
= Large scale mapping and development of topographic 
database for rural areas with population greater than 200 
families; 
* Development of Iranian NSDI; 
= Development of National Spatial Data Transfer Standard. 
This strategic plan and related national projects can guarantee a 
stable development of the country in terms of spatial data 
production and usage as well as education and research in 
Geomatics domain. In any case, many efforts have been made 
during last decade to change the situation of the country in 
terms of available map and spatial information and a 
comparison to ten years ago shows a dramatic change in this 
relation. The following paragraphs briefly explain the current 
situation. 
3.2 Digital Topographic Maps and National Topographic 
Database 
Fortunately, the current situation of available topographic maps 
compared to ten years ago shows a dramatic change not only in 
terms of number of map sheets, but also regarding the 
restrictions of individual access to geographic information. In 
order to explain the current situation in terms of topographic 
maps and database, the following projects have to be addressed: 
1:25000 scale base map series: This project was started in 
199 1using analogue technology and then switched to digital 
products. By the end of 2003, the number of digital maps 
produced in this project passed the number of 8300. Note 
that the country will be covered by about 10000 map sheets 
in this scale. The remaining parts mostly consist of border 
areas that confront with some security problems for aerial 
photography. 
In the mean time, preparation phase for updating these data 
has been finalized and proper action will be executed during 
the year 2004. 
= National Topographic Database (NTDB): As a consequence 
to new digital technology, NCC decided to create National 
Topographic Database of the country based on above 
mentioned 1:25000 base maps. The first step was design 
and standardization of this database followed by applying 
necessary changes to production line. The NTDB standard 
was published in 1994 and creation of this database started 
at the same time. At the time being, all the produced 
1:25000 maps have been entered to this database. 
«  1:2000 scale map series of the cities: In 2001, increasing 
demand of governmental and private organizations for 
reliable and updated large scale maps of cities for various 
purposes motivated the MPO to assign responsibility of this 
project to NCC. This project started with 630 cities but it 
exceeded the number of 900 cities during past three years. 
Although, digital maps of about 220 cities have been 
produced within this project but still a great number of 
cities (about 570 cities) are suffering from lack of updated