After a brief review and modeling of Javanese land cover units, an assessment of the operational cartographic capability of SPOT in Indonesia is presented. For full images, basic manipulations of level 1B SPOT digital data and photographs provide standard deviation accuracies towards local TM maps of 2 and 3 pixels, respectively. Due to the poor reliability of most TM maps, SPOT should undoubtedly be set as a major cartographic data source in Indonesia.