corporate entities recognize these infrastructure needs. 
In forming corporate partnerships and distribution 
alliances, each of the companies is using different 
strategies, providing many consumer alternatives for 
value-addedimages (georegistration,orthorectification, 
feature enhancement, radiometric intensification, etc.) 
and value added products (DTM's, orthophotos, image 
mosaics, fused MS and pan scenes, etc.). This total 
service capability environment will strongly influence 
the entire GIS/mapping community to coalesce many 
of its traditionally fragmented, small (what is 
colloquially known as Mom and Pop outfits) corporate 
businesses into large corporate entities or limited 
liability coalitions. This should not be considered a 
negative sign, but rather a sign of technological, 
industrial and scientific maturation. The market will 
increase as consumers become more sophisticated and 
less concerned with the technical complexities of 
image processing, which has been a traditional 
necessity. 
Institutional Issues 
International acceptance of the concept for high 
resolution space imaging systems to commercially 
deliver image data on a daily basis, which heretofore 
has been the privileged domain of governmental 
organizations, is a primary issue which will soon be 
tested. As these commercial systems come on-line, it 
can be expected that the need for an international 
consortium may arise (Perhaps an INTEOSAT along 
the lines of INTELSAT). Issues and needs of 
common interest to the commercial operators include 
open skies policies, coordination of orbit allocations, 
pricing competition with government systems, data 
copyright protection, ombudsmanship to address 
sensitive political events, exclusivity, etc. It is quite 
conceivable that the growth of these commercial 
ventures will lead to significant commercialization of 
many government mapping programs. 
Benefits of Commercial Digital Imaging Systems 
Even with the high capitalization costs of satellite 
systems, their advantages of imaging timeliness, rapid 
delivery, digital form, simultaneous pan and MS 
coverage, superior coverage per processing unit, temporal 
repetitivity, radiometric dynamic range and stereometric 
fidelity make them very cost competitive with aerial 
images. In fact, for square unit of coverage, aerial 
images are projected to be more than twice as 
expensive to acquire. 
A Look into the Future 
It is uncertain how many of these commercial ventures 
will survive in the competitive marketplace. The 
future is promising for many of them because of the 
increasing reliance of modern technological tools and 
social services for identification of locations and 
attribution of people, places and things. Digital 
technology is here to stay and digital imaging 
technology is in the forefront of automated 
information systems. Societal needs for information 
from imagery will migrate from basic mapping 
products to temporal, site specific updates. These data 
and information revisions will be requested frequently 
on an annual to hourly basis, in many ways the 
requests will be analogous to today's weather updates. 
Spatial resolutions available from satellites will 
increase with international recognition of the benefits 
of all-digital imaging and processing technology. The 
aerial imaging industry will be transformed to digital 
imaging and mostly integrated with the commercial 
satellite companies. Many more constellations of 
Earth observing satellites carrying varieties of 
advanced sensors, from dial-a-band hyperspectral to 
precise pointable dial-a-scale will be launched. On- 
board storage and processing capabilities will permit 
on-satellite image comparison (change detection) and 
filtering so that only specified change data need be 
transmitted to ground processing information systems. 
As we in the spatial information sciences mature and 
learn to integrate our technologies into the 
information market of the future, the burden of 
educating our consumers to our technology will 
diminish and the imagery origin of our products may 
well be transparent to the majority of our future 
sophisticated users of information from imagery. The 
future is very bright and promising for the 
photogrammetry/remote sensing/GIS community. 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 
It is with great appreciation that I thank Dr. Richard 
Herring and Douglas Gerull of EarthWatch, Gilbert 
Rye and Armand Mancini of OSC, John Neer and Bill 
Folchi of Space Imaging, Dr. Phil Currier and Sean P. 
Crook of GDE Systems and Richard Genay of 
Resource 21 for sharing information and graphics on 
their systems. 
282 
International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXI, Part B4. Vienna 1996 
  
  
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