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TEACHING CARTOGRAPHY TO NON-CARTOGRAPHERS 
As a subsidiary subject or as a short-term course for those that that will not have 
cartographic duties as their main task, two new developments are relevant: the 
development of desk top mapping and the development of knowledge-based systems in 
map design. 
Right now the software market is being provided extensively with map design routines, 
incorporated in business graphics packages, statistical packages or in their own right. 
These will allow for the fast and automated production of maps, and as these are 
applied usually by the non-graphicate (that is those without sufficient idea about the 
requirements and possibilities of (carto)graphic images, we will have to fear for the 
victims. It falls to the cartographer to try to cure the patients, and the waiting-rooms of 
our cartographic laboratories are filled with them. 
Desk Top Mapping is the current designation of the application of these mapping 
packages. Advantages of these packages are that maps can be produced without having 
to call on professional cartographers, that they have a graphical quality suitable for 
illustrating reports or leaflets, and that they can produce originals for simple colour 
printing. Drawbacks of the use of desk top mapping software are that, if one does not 
use the expertise of cartographers, one is liable to make mistakes in the graphical 
presentation. 
A first step in teaching non-cartographers the use of these packages, then, is to make 
them aware of the requirements of the cartographic grammar. Based upon the spatial 
properties of the data to be represented and the kind of message to be conveyed, 
specific graphic variables have to be selected and combined in mapping methods. This 
step can be omitted when special modules are added to the mapping packages that 
analyse the spatial properties of the data and the communication requirements and on 
this basis select the proper mapping methods, leaving open only the options to select the 
shape or colour of the symbols needed. These modules are developed nowadays all over 
the world, and we hope to be able to convert, as a next project of our commission, one 
of these knowledge/expert systems to a map design training package for general use. 
After the initial conceptual training, which only provides answers to the most commonly 
asked questions, potential desk top mapping users must be made aware of the 
shortcomings of these packages. The range of mapping methods available on them is 
reduced, as most of them do not have isoline map or flow line map options. There are 
no possibilities yet for professional colour printing quality, as there is no option for rota 
ting screens and thus avoid moiree. Full colour does not present difficulties, but this 
does restrict the design options. The misconception that in Desk Top Mapping the 
printing press is incorporated should be actively countered. 
Another restraint is the availability of topographic databases. For non-professional 
cartographers (at least that is our experience) an occasionally executed digitizing job is 
extremely time-consuming and error-prone, so that one is really dependant on what is 
available off the shelf from software houses. 
Teaching desk-top mapping was presented here as an example of what cartographers 
think their partners in the mapping sciences should at least know about cartography. It 
is to be regarded in the same light as e.g. the knowledge of remote sensing deemed 
necessary for cartographers. It is by speaking each others language that the mapping