Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The Beginning of GIS in Hungary
The first real GIS company was Geometria , which was established in 1986.
Hungary was still a socialist country and all economic activities were state owned
and controlled. Geometria has had a determining role in network information and
has been the leading service supplier of geographical information system applica-
tions in Hungary since its foundation. The company developed alfaGrafik and
topoLogic , their first basic GIS software, which reached significant success in
several professional forums including also the International Cartographic Confer-
ence in Budapest in 1989.
The first GIS-based applications were municipality systems, environmental
protection systems, town and route designing systems, police and fire brigade
supporting systems, regional and city planning projects and utility systems.
The first legal copy of the ESRI PC ArcInfo was sold to the Budapest Land
Administration in 1988, which was not a simple process due to the restrictions by
CoCom.
The National Atlas of Hungary was published in 1989. Although it was made by
traditional cartographic technologies, some supplementary sheets were published a
few years later to reflect the political and economic changes; these maps presented
topics which were not published in the Soviet times (like gipsy population, elec-
tions, unemployment rate). These supplementary sheets were probably the first
offset printed maps which were produced by GIS software.
Digital State Topographic Maps
The first digital map which covered the whole country was the DTA-200 (Digital
Cartographic Database) , which was created between 1987 and 1989. DTA-200 is
the digital version of the 1:200,000 scale military topographic maps in Gauss-
Kr¨ger projection system. Due to the contemporary software and hardware oppor-
tunities, the Cartographic Institute of the Ministry of Defence shifted to the
1:500,000 scale version of those maps. Even this map contained so much data
that the relief details (contour lines) and forested areas were omitted. Relief details
could be replaced by the DTM-200 of the Hungarian Post Office Experimental
Institute. The lack of forested areas in the digital map was probably the information
that did not reduce considerably the number of users. These paper maps were
classified, so the DTA-200 was used only in military environment, and the number
of users was quite limited in the beginning.
The total size of the DTA-200 in the Gauss-Kr¨ger projection system was only
7.2 MB, but it was also available in the Unified National Mapping System. The
main importance of this work was to provide enough practice and experience to the
experts of the military cartography in order to manage a much larger digitizing
project.
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