Suchergebnisse

The House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology has examined remote sensing and digital mapping, taking the view that these represented converging fields of endeavour which are now of considerable scientific and commercial importance. This paper reports the way in which the Committee worked and how it saw the main issues—such as establishing user needs, the availability of trained manpower, and the availability of software tools (Geographical Information Systems or GIS) for handling the rapidly increasing data volumes. The Committee's conclusions with regard to GIS are itemised and the Government's response to these recommendations is examined. Finally, the roles of the leading 'actors' in the report creation process are briefly examined.

A recent court case has raised a number of issues relating to the nature of representative democracy in Britain. In particular, the importance of equality of electorates among constituencies relative to other criteria employed in the redistricting procedure has been raised. The court findings emphasised the subjectivity inherent at all stages of the redistricting process at present. We describe procedures, combining data analysis and mapping, whereby such subjectivity can be restricted to the later stages, so allowing the final decisions to be made in a fully informed context. Such procedures raise issues relating to public contributions to the various stages of the redistricting process, and a speculative final section to the paper extends the ideas that we outline.