This year, the first students are expected to graduate from the University of Cape Town's four-year geomatics programme. UCT's Department of Geomatics has grown out of the discipline of surveying, where it was one of the oldest surveying departments outside of Europe. Geomatics students enrol for courses that cover all the components of surveying (eg surveying, photogrammetry and remote sensing, land law and geodesy), but geomatics goes way beyond that. Students are now equipped for a career in spatial information technology. In addition to grounding in surveying and computer science, they now take courses that cover GIS, database management systems, spatial analysis, software engineering of GIS applications and 3D visualisation.

Although for the past 25 years UCT surveying graduates have been proficient in computer programming, the geomatics programme requires a basic foundation in computer science with the option to complete a three-year major in the subject. The third year GIS course includes software engineering and GIS application development. This equips graduates with a far broader selection of career options than surveying alone and there has already been commercial interest in one of the Map Objects applications developed by a third year student in 1999, which is a partially automated meta-data management system.

For further information, contact Mike Barry at UCT on (021) 650 3577 or geomatics@eng.uct.ac.za