Abstract
Abstract. Systematic geological mapping of a country is done mainly by state authorities often involving industrial and academic partners in the process. The resolution of the result is controlled primarily by the financial background of the firms and the scale of the available base maps. In Hungary the state authority for geological mapping was established in 1869. Prior to this, geological maps were aimed to give an overview of the country. Later the mapping campaigns focused on providing support for the industry, agriculture and civil engineering. The need for detailed maps of raw materials led to increased efforts and founding, but from the end of the 1970s the mining industry did not need more maps and the geological mapping campaigns lost their inertia. Parallel with this, in the Cold War era, the ban to use detailed topography on geological maps ruined the ergonomic value of the produced cartographic materials. After the collapse of the socialist economy in 1989 the state authority concentrated on digitizing the existing data instead of systematic geological mapping. Geological maps became an illustration of extensive contributed books about certain regions, which were made by scientists for scientist. Though, many of these medium-scale geological maps are now provided via internet, large-scale maps are not available. In the last decade, the use-case of the geological maps seem to be changing again. The geological information interests not only the professionals, but the larger audience as well. Also, the spreading of geotourism, created a need to compile geotourist maps.
Highlights
The aim of the geological mapping is to gather information about the materials and geological processes (Compton, 1985). This information is usually important for the mining industry, but recently the tourism exploit it as new destinations can be identified with the help of geological maps (Hose, 1996)
This tendency includes the geological maps, and by setting up map servers to provide geological information for the public, the Hungarian state authority of geological mapping follows the flow. There is another tendency: the users of geological maps is changing from professionals towards the wider audience
The needs of the new audience differs from the needs of the professional community, and ideally both can be satisfied by publishing a variety of cartographic materials of the same area with different layout and legend
Summary
The aim of the geological mapping is to gather information about the materials and geological processes (Compton, 1985). This information is usually important for the mining industry, but recently the tourism exploit it as new destinations can be identified with the help of geological maps (Hose, 1996). In the early 19th century, at the dawn of modern geology, maps became a visual language for geologists (Lyell, 1830; Eyles, 1972; Rudwick, 1976). James Hutton’s and William Smith's mapping method became widespread and a standard for their followers (Dean, 1992), but with maps using the ancient and crude representation of hypsography as “mole hills”, the visual language of geology would never have emerged. The evolution of topographic mapping and the increasing resolution of publicly available topographic data was a key factor in the usability of geological maps
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