The paper presents the novel complex methods of thematic mapping for the purpose of revealing the impact of geologic, geomorfological and climatic factors on the spatial distribution of vegetation communities in the alpine belt of the Greater Caucasus. Combined application of remote sensing and GIS methods is particularly effective for a complex survey and mapping in the regions difficult to access.

Beginning from 1989 the Hungarian cartography is under an intensive process of diversification and significant changes. This paper tries to delineate in a very general way the present structure of the Hungarian cartographic society from the tasks filled by the state cartography to the multifaceted activities of the private map companies. In interest of describing all the sectors related to this field are presented also national organizations, our representation in international organizations, periodicals, higher education institutions and the most important public map collections in the country.

The state geodesic and cartographic resources include the following spatial databases: General Geographic Database, VMap L2, VMap L3 and Topographic Database. Only one of those databases – the VMap Level 2 base may at present serve as a reference database, since it covers the whole territory of Poland and its scope and level of detail is equivalent to the classical topographic map. Yet, the practical use of the VMap digital data is limited on account of the complex structure (224 feature classes grouped in eight categories) and the lack of automatic cartographic visualisation. This paper presents a proposal of VMap L2 database structure simplification for analyses and visualization purposes. There are three main methods of data integration described. The database modification experiments carried out with the use of GIS software allowed to choose one of them: according to the similarity of object characteristics with geometric type preservation. Although the usable structure of VMap L2 database is not free of drawbacks, it does meet the requirements laid down in the introduction.

Economic needs of the European countries as well as the increasing opportunities and low costs of IT technology caused in 80s. changes in collecting, storing and made available to users land data. Most of the countries decided at that time to create topographic databases. One of the factors that can slow down the creation of a database is very broad thematic scope. In Poland, it was decided that all topographic objects presented on topo maps should be stored and maintained in the database. This very costly and time-consuming solution results in only few per cent of coverage of topographic data. The authors analysed thematic scope of the Polish TBD and 13 EU national civil vector topographic databases with the level of details corresponding to the scale 1:10 000. The analysis allowed authors to show the similarities and differences between TBD and other databases, concerning their thematic scope and to indicate which topographic objects or their attributes could be reduced.