Status and Development of Geomatic s in China

Mechanization is the characteristic of the industrial era and computerization is the characteristic of the Information Era. Now we are facing on the transition from Industrial Era to information Era. Established the National Geo-spatial Data Infrastructures is the fundamental base for information society and is one part of the national basic economic development plan. From 1980's China started his successful transition from traditional methods to high-tech based mapping. China has laid out a high accuracy national GPS (global Positioning System) network, and completed the geographic information databases for scale of 1:1million and 1:250,000. Now it is working on the databases for scales of 1:50,000 and 1:10,000, the world highest level. The massive national programmed has been dubbed "Digital China," since it involves massive quantities of digitized geographical information. Simultaneity, GIS technology and the geo-spatial data have been used widely in electronic government affair, environmental protection, disaster control, ITS and etc. The users have realized the benefits more and more widely. Internet is an efficient way to distribute the geo-information, the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping has give great effort to settle down the rules and standards to establish the clearing house. Some National Geo-standards have issued, and some of them are on the way. The GIS software is another important factor in the GIS industry. Chinese government working-out some good policy to supports the GIS software developer to have their own copyright. This paper is based on the above to introduce the status and development of Geomatics in China. in China.