With the aim of exploring and conserving soil resources, and promoting soil science, China conducted the second nation-wide soil survey in 1979, and has made substantial achievements out of the survey. To make better use of the results and also to keep abreast of the development in science and technology, constructing a soil database became an urgent task. After ten years of joint efforts, a soil database for Zhejiang Province was completed, encompassing 1:50 000 digitized soil maps for all the counties of the Province and consisting of three sections, i.e. spatial data, attribute data and meta data. The use of the techniques of automatic and semi-automatic soil boundary recognition developed through independent R