Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
By the end of 1980s, Geometria created the National GIS Basic Database
(OTAB) , which was the digital version of the 1:100,000 scale EOTR civil topo-
graphic map (all content except the relief). Completing the digital topographic map
of the entire country constituted a very important step in the development of GIS in
Hungary, since it enabled work on different regional GIS designing and analysing
systems. This was also the time of the political changes in Hungary, when a lot of
international companies from Western Europe invested here, and most of them
were very keen on using GIS.
OTAB has three levels (in fact, they were made in different scales and at
different generalization levels):
• detailed level: 1:100,000-1:250,000
• overview level: 1:500,000-1:1,000,000
• presentation level: 1:1,000,000-1:2,000,000
For most of the business users the thematic layers (like transportation, bound-
aries and hydrology) were most important; it was especially important that
Geometria offered update on these thematic layers because the civil state cartogra-
phy was not prepared for such requests (at least not at that time).
The transition process of Central and Eastern European countries was quite fast
especially in the case of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. These countries
officially joined NATO in 1999, but due to various partnership programmes these
countries were already familiar with the NATO requirements earlier. Hungary
offered a former military air base (Tasz ´ r) in the Balkan Wars in 1995; this place
became the primary staging post for US peacekeeping forces coming and going into
the Balkans.
As modern military air navigation is based on digital maps, it was important to
the US and NATO forces to have a detailed digital topographic map of Hungary
available. When the Cartographic Institute of the Ministry of Defence finished
DTA-200 in 1989, they immediately started the preparation of the digitization of
the 1:50,000 scale military topographic maps (altogether 319 sheets), the DTA-50 .
The real work started in 1993, when both the hardware options (Laserscan) and the
financial background was fixed or at least the project seemed realistic enough to
start. The first version of this digital map was nothing else than just a digital version
of the paper maps. The 2.0 version of the DTA-50 was released in 1998, which was
much closer to a real GIS database. Altogether more than 700 different objects were
entered into the database. The most common feature categories were the geodetic
points, settlements, facilities,
transport, bridges, hydrology, relief, vegetation,
boundaries, and scripts.
When the DTA-50 2.0 was released, all updating process of these maps was
moved to a complete digital environment. The 1:25,000 scale military topographic
maps are still in paper form (more than 1,100 sheets). Although the military
cartographers have already enough experience, the process started only in 2004
due to the lack of suitable financial support. This was the time when the military
cartography changed to the UTM projection system.
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