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The society continues to operate its Special Interest
Groups in Education, GIS, Geology, Field Spectroscopy
and Ocean Colour. This has recently been augmented by
two new groups: in Archaeology and SAR. The official
publication of the Society is the International Journal of
Remote Sensing, currently running at 18 issues per year,
and it also publishes a quarterly Newsletter, an annual
report and occasional monographs. The Society operates
an electronic bulletin board containing general information
and notes on opportunities relevant to remote sensing. A
number of awards are given by the Society ranging from
the Remote Sensing Society Award and Gold Medal for
distinguished achievement in remote sensing to travel
bursaries and support for research in progress. The major
event is the Annual Conference at which the Annual
General Meeting of the Society is held. Other one and
two day meetings and workshops are held, often run by
the Special Interest Groups and in conjunction with other
Societies.
The Society has a large overseas membership and seeks
to cater for the needs of these members by promoting
their research and providing a forum for the exchange of
expertise and knowledge. The Society also continues to
develop its links with other Societies both within the UK
and abroad, including the Photogrammetric Society, the
Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and.the French
Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (with
whom a successful joint conference was held in 1994)
and the Dutch RS and Photogrammetric Societies. In
addition to these activities, the Society also works in
collaboration with the European Association of Remote
Sensing Laboratories (EARSeL) and has been officially
represented at a number of meetings of other overseas
societies.
The Remote Sensing and Photogrammetric Societies still
remain entirely distinct in the UK although members
continue to enjoy the reciprocal benefits of preferential
registration rates at society events. Analysis of the
membership lists of the two societies shows only a small
overlap of individual members (mainly from education
establishments) or of corporate members (mainly from
government institutions).
The Survey & Mapping Alliance (SMA), formed in 1989,
was wound up in 1994, following the fourth UK national
Survey and Mapping conference in 1993, but most of the
participating societies and institutions of SMA, including
the Photogrammetric Society, recombined in November
1994 to form the Survey & Mapping special interest group
of the Association of Geographic Information (AGI), which
holds an annual conference and exhibition.
NAPLIB continues as an independent but small
organisation promoting the use and preservation of aerial
photographs. Its Directory of Aerial Photographic
Collections in the UK published in 1993 is the best single
Source of information on 372 collections, and work on a
second edition is in progress.
International Archives of Photogrammetry and
1.1 Types of organisations
The private sector accounts for over half the
organisations involved in photogrammetry and remote
sensing and educational establishments account for
about a quarter of the total (Table 1.1). Government-
funded organisations account for the balance (17%).
These figures are based on the questionnaire returns,
which include all the larger organisations with
photogrammetric and/or remote sensing activities. For
smaller private and education organisations, the remote
sensing returns are thought to be under-representative.
TABLE 1.1 Organisation by type and activities:
Photogram R.S. Both Totals
Government 3 6 8 17
funded
Private 26 20 7 53
Education and 6 15 7 28
non-profit
Totals 35 41 22 98
2.PHOTOGRAMMETRY
This section of the report is sourced from corporate and
individual membership of the Photogrammetric Society. In
the United Kingdom photogrammetry continues to be a
specialist scientific operation employing only a few
hundred persons in total. Realistic figures are difficult to
assemble because most persons working in
photogrammetry do so as a component of a larger
discipline. For example, lecturers in tertiary education will
frequently teach photogrammetry within topographic or
cartographic science; and experts in such technical fields
as archaeology, architecture, civil engineering and
medicine may use photogrammetry as a small component
of their data capture and analysis.
The developing merger between photogrammetry, remote
sensing, automated cartography and geographical
information systems (GIS) also makes it difficult to identify
photogrammetrists as members of an independent
profession. The spectacular increase in the use of PCs
and workstations as a tool in laboratory measurement
and analysis has aided the move towards digital
photogrammetry and compounded the integration of
photogrammetry within the general subject of mapping
science. While the term geomatics has not established
itself in the UK, the term photogrammetry does not fully
represent the subject that some former
photogrammetrists are now engaged upon.
The questionnaire returns illustrated the problems of
distinguishing photogrammetric and remote sensing
operations from each other and from the broader area of
spatial science. It was noted that the returns of many
questionnaires sent to organisations thought of as
photogrammetry-orientated showed both
photogrammetric and remote sensing activities, whereas
the questionnaires sent to organisations thought of as
remote-sensing orientated sometimes also showed
photogrammetric activity.
87
Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXI, Part B6. Vienna 1996