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THE EUROPEAN REMOTE SENSING AND PHOTOGRAMMETRY 
(ERSAP) DATABASE 
Irene Mader, European Space Agency, ESRIN, Italy 
Charles-Henri Latarche, Groupement pour le Développement de la Télédétection 
Aérospatiale, France 
ISPRS Commission VI 
ABSTRACT 
The background, present status and future 
prospects of the European Remote Sensing and 
Photogrammetry Database being developed under 
the auspices of the European Space Agency are 
presented. International cooperation aspects in 
the various phases of the evolution of this 
project are outlined. 
Initiated following a recommendation of the 15° 
ISPRS congress in Kyoto (1988) and a 
cooperative agreement between  ESRIN, (the 
European Space Agency establishment in Italy) 
and GDTA, France, this database will encompass 
all the documents generated in European 
countries in the fields of surveying, mapping, 
remote sensing and related applications. 
This online file will complement all imagery 
catalogues and products, and all online services 
and tools developed by the European Space Agency 
as support to its Earth Observation and 
Environmental Programmes. 
KEY WORDS: Data Base, Remote Sensing, Remote 
Sensing Applications, 
Photogrammetry, European Space 
Agency, Europe, International 
Cooperation 
1. INTRODUCTION 
The establishment of a bibliographic Remote 
Sensing and Photogrammetry Database was the 
subject of a resolution taken by the Commission 
VI at the Hamburg congress in 1980. 
The following steps can be traced back first to 
the Mainz symposium in 1982 with a paper 
presented by J. H. Ten Haken entitled "An 
Investigation of Available On-line Databases in 
the Field of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing", 
and then to the Rio congress in 1984 with the 
paper of Prof. J. Hotmer entitled "The ISPRS-IRS 
Information Retrieval System for Literature and 
Factual Data"  (WG  VI-4) of fundamental 
importance to the implementation of the project. 
In parallel, Ch.-H. Latarche presented an 
inventory of relevant existing databases at the 
Rio congress in 1984, concluding that the 
databases were spread across a large number of 
international hosts. In 1986 the Badagry 
symposium confirmed previous resolutions. 
Joint action and coordination, with a view to 
defining a single set of creation procedures for 
a unified and standardised database in the field 
of Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry, was needed 
due to: 
= the increasing development of remote 
sensing, particularly in view of new image 
technologies 
= the recent advances made in photogrammetry 
and the contribution to Geographic: 
Information systems (GIS) 
= the scattered locations of existing 
databases and the consequent increasing 
number of access procedures and languages 
= the proliferation of different hardware, 
standards and formats due to the explosion 
of microcomputing and the large number of 
new subject-specific databases 
A working group under the lead of GDTA, having 
given consideration to the timeliness of 
implementing the ISPRS-IRS database, has 
conducted a study of the existing resources in 
1988 amongst the organisations potentially 
interested in the project. The results of the 
survey and of a questionnaire sent to 600 
European organisations were used to study the 
users' information requirements. The broad 
outline of a proposed ISPRS-IRS database was 
beginning to take shape. 
The feasibility study, presented at the Kyoto 
congress in 1988, entitled "Prospective Study 
for an ISPRS Database" by D. Burette, 
Ch.-H. Latarche et al. put forward several 
possible configurations, each leading to a 
project implementation based on different 
possible networks of producers with various 
choices to be made and areas to be considered 
such as: 
= choice of host 
= types of informations to enter into 
the database 
= choice of thesaurus 
= indexing languages 
= database language 
= analytical or non-analytical database 
= dissemination products 
= etc 
At that time the necessity for a close and 
complex coordination with various geographically 
distributed database producers and the lack of 
definitions in the various areas mentioned above 
was delaying the implementation of the ISPRS 
database.