Developing Map Databases: Problems and Solutions - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 140

too (Rigaux P, Scholl M, Voisard A (2002) Spatial databases with application to
GIS. Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington).

12.1 Introduction

Research projects and teaching at the university missed the availability of digital
maps for long, although there were many paper maps in the map collection. A large
number of map databases are now accessible in the Internet: some of them are
free, but they mostly charge for their use ( http://lazarus.elte.hu/gb/linkek.htm ,
http://lazarus.elte.hu/hun/index.html , http://www.davidrumsey.com , http://www.lib.
berkeley.edu/EART/topo.html , http://turistautak.hu , http://library.stanford.edu/depts/
branner/collections/sovietmil.html , http://www.nasa.gov , http://www.terraserver.com ).
The laws regulating the use of maps are very different from country to country, and
the data policy changes from government to government. It is not surprising
that “sharp” maps are rarely found on free web pages. As for the fresh satellite
images and aerial photos, the case is the same. It is even more difficult to find free
vector maps, particularly those that have link codes to databases.
University researchers and teachers very much need a well-organized carto-
graphic database that is available for everyone at the university. The Department
has done important steps in this direction by setting up an information system
named EDIT. (The acronym stands for the Hungarian words of University Digital
Map Collection.) More than 10,000 maps have been entered into the database,
which is completed with a data loading application and an online query system
(Fig. 12.1 ). Although the original plan only counted with users from the university,
and the data loading is not complete yet, and a part of the users of the system
already comes from outside the university. In the beginning, the EDIT system was
only accessible from the nodes in the elte domain that is for the teaching and
research units that take part in the training of students of earth sciences and
computer science. Later, the range of users greatly expanded. The University of
Debrecen and the University of P´cs were the first to join the system. Further
members include the University of Szeged, two Academic institutions (the Geo-
graphical Research Institute and the Balaton Limnological Research Institute), and
the Institute and Museum of Military History.
This paper introduces the EDIT system and its major parameters.

12.2 University Digital Map Collection (EDIT)

The EDIT is an information system built on the principle of relation databases and
made for the management, inventory, and service of raster and vector map data. The
raster data include scanned maps, orthophotos, and hyperspectral aerial images,
while the vector data are mostly available in ESRI shape and Mapinfo tab formats.