Sharing cartographic knowledge

We are inviting you to a ICC 2021 pre-conference joint workshop by the ICA Commissions on SDI and Standards, Cognitive Issues in Geographic Information Visualization, Open Source Geospatial Technologies and Geospatial Semantics

Date: Monday, 13 December, 9:00 – 12:30 (CET) / 8:00 – 11:30 (UCT)
Format: hybrid
Register here

Venue for physical participation: Firenze, Via Laura, 48, Room A2.09
Virtual participation: zoom link will be emailed to registered participants

The International Cartographic Association (ICA) recently joined the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international consortium of more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities. Their focus is on standardization towards the interoperability of geospatial data, applications and services “to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable”. Our Commissions, together with the Working Group on the Cartography Body of Knowledge, have started discussions on how the ICA could contribute to the OGC. Two potential topics emerged which will be explored further in this workshop. 

1. Standardization of terminology
Several multilingual dictionaries of cartographic terms have been published since the 1970s, however, new terms have emerged since then, e.g. map tile, pan and zoom. At the same time, these terms have not been defined in many languages, e.g. those spoken in Africa and Asia. We have started compiling a list of cartographic terms relevant today for using maps. Through this workshop we would like to further refine the list by involving workshop participants. 

2. Making cartographic knowledge accessible to software developers
Contemporary cartographic practice uses a range of computing technologies for creating maps. Many software tools for making maps are not built by cartographers, but rather by software engineers, some of whom have limited cartographic training or mapmaking experience. Researchers have tried to capture cartographic knowledge to support them, e.g. through expert systems, cartographic workflows, or cartographic ontologies. In this workshop we will present cartographic and technical perspectives on map making and discuss how to bridge the gap between these different viewpoints.

The full schedule is available here.