Richland County experience—namely, that public agencies may be asked for their data by members of the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Although disclosure is required by law, it is not clear whether the agencies must comply with such requests if the data are acquired under commercial remote sensing licensing restrictions.

Still other issues that arose in Richland County include the need for common standards across all counties so that the data in multiple jurisdictions can be compared and integrated into multijurisdictional databases; problems of data storage (Richland County already has one terabyte of data and is expanding its holdings); and legislation to limit the use of spatial technologies such as remote sensing and GIS in South Carolina.^3,4

Boulder County began to use spatial data in 1987 to maintain and upgrade tax maps of parcels in the county.⁵ From what was a modest beginning, the county now uses spatial data for a broad range of purposes, from locating prairie dog colonies to identifying wetlands to tracing fence lines. The county uses various types of remote sensing data in conjunction with GIS data in applications in public health, land use, parks and open space, road maintenance, and even redrawing precinct boundaries as population distribution changes.

Boulder County obtains its remote sensing data from Landsat; the Système pour l’Observation de la Terre (SPOT), a French remote sensing satellite; the Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS); and aerial photos. The Indian remote sensing data are marketed in the United States by Space Imaging, Inc., a private firm, and SPOT data by another commercial entity, Spot Image. The county also creates its own data on roads, streams, and parcels.

Front Matter (R1-R14)

Executive Summary (1-7)

1. Introduction (8-15)

2. Public Sector Applications of Remote Sensing Data (16-37)

3. Getting Started in Remote Sensing: Common Barriers and Bottlenecks (38-49)

4. Beyond State and Local Government (50-61)

5. Findings and Recommendations (62-70)

Appendix A: Transforming Remote Sensing Data into Information and Applications, Executive Summary (71-78)

Appendix B: Biographical Information on Steering Committee Members, Workshop Speakers, and Panelists (79-89)

Appendix C: Workshop Agenda and Participants (90-95)

Appendix D: Acronyms (96-97)