The Role of Output Devices in the Higher Education Courses of Cartography - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 35

immediately by experts and led to a major program at Harvard University's
Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis to develop a general-
purpose GIS. Early GIS developers recognized that the same basic needs were
present in many different application areas, from resource management to the
census.
In a largely separate development during the second half of the 1960s,
cartographers and mapping agencies had begun to ask whether computers might
be adapted to their needs, and possibly to make the map producing more cost
effective. The UK Experimental Cartography Unit (ECU) pioneered high-quality
computer mapping in 1968; it published the world's probably first computer-made
map in a regular series in 1973 with the British Geological Survey; the ECU also
pioneered GIS work in education, and much else. National mapping agencies, such
as Britain's Ordnance Survey, France's Institut Geographique National, and the US
Geological Survey and the Defense Mapping Agency began to investigate the
use of computers to support the editing of maps, to avoid the expensive and
slow process of hand correction and redrafting. The first automated cartography
developments occurred in the 1960s, and by the late 1970s most major cartographic
agencies in the Western part of the World were already computerized to some
degree. But the magnitude of the task ensured that it was not until 1995 that the first
countries achieved complete digital map coverage in a database (including digital
state cadastral and topographic maps series) (Longley 2005 ).
Remote sensing also played an important part in the development of GIS (and
also cartography), as a source of technology and more importantly as a source of
data. The first military satellites of the 1950s were developed in great secrecy to
gather intelligence, but the declassification of much of this material in recent years
has provided interesting insights into the role played by the military and intelli-
gence communities in the development of GIS. Although the early spy satellites
used conventional film cameras to record images, digital remote sensing began to
replace them in the early 1970s. At that time civilian remote sensing systems such
as Landsat were beginning to provide vast new data resources and to exploit the
technologies of image classification and pattern recognition that had been devel-
oped earlier for military applications. Weather satellite images had also an impor-
tant role especially in meteorology where the low resolution of the early images was
good enough to improve the precision of global weather forecasts. Nowadays
satellite remote sensing provides the best quality large-area coverage database on
Earth (Harris 1987 ).
Although there is no close contact to the output side of the cartographic process
we also have to mention another important step of digital cartography, the global
satellite navigation systems such as GPS. However GPS became widely used in the
civil cartography only in the twenty-first century, although for military use it was
already available around 1980.