Economic needs of the European countries as well as the increasing opportunities and low costs of IT technology caused in 80s. changes in collecting, storing and made available to users land data. Most of the countries decided at that time to create topographic databases. One of the factors that can slow down the creation of a database is very broad thematic scope. In Poland, it was decided that all topographic objects presented on topo maps should be stored and maintained in the database. This very costly and time-consuming solution results in only few per cent of coverage of topographic data. The authors analysed thematic scope of the Polish TBD and 13 EU national civil vector topographic databases with the level of details corresponding to the scale 1:10 000. The analysis allowed authors to show the similarities and differences between TBD and other databases, concerning their thematic scope and to indicate which topographic objects or their attributes could be reduced.

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