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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.