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Orientation towards mapping policies
Another new aspect of the curriculum is the emphasis on and the stronger orientation to
user communities. More attention is paid to the information needs of society, to the
costs of the data gathering and presentation processes, intended for either management,
planning or decision making."Cartographers need to study public policies and program
mandates which drive mapping programs and the development of cartographic databa
ses. Of co-equal importance are the communication networks and message flows that
are the life force of our cartographic system. Today cartographers must understand the
tasks and priorities of the end-users of their maps and be prepared to work with them as
they seek to understand data combined from different sources and to share with others
the tasks of creating and using spatial databases"(Dahlberg 1988).
Atlas cartography.
A sort of ultimate cartographic endeavour was the production of atlases, and it is here
also that our change-over to digital procedures has made a restructuring of courses
necessary. Traditional concepts like atlas structure, which denotes the order in which
the various cartographic images are offered to the user, relationships of maps that are
on the same atlas double page spread, relations between maps, explanatory texts, graphs
and images, all had their own contribution to the overall picture an atlas is trying to
convey.
Electronic atlases do not have these means for structuring the information flow, and we
have to look for other possibilities. On the other hand they have new options, such as
zooming in, panning, the combination of information layers in a set order, and they have
an enormous potential for analysis. This goes from simple tasks like locating places
found in the register (by automatically visualizing the largest-scale map they are on, and
having the names blink) to requesting the ten images that are closest in pattern to a
particular map.
Structured as atlas information systems, electronic atlases are more geared to the
information needs of our society, and students have to become familiar with accounting
strategies, with different tarifs for browsing data or for visualizing data in map form.
So, the digital era has provided us with the needs for an almost complete restructuring
of the cartographic teaching programme.
INTEGRATION OF CARTOGRAPHY AND OTHER MAPPING SCIENCES
New changes necessitated by GIS development
Impressive successes achieved in the automation of numerous map-making tasks are
increasingly being overshadowed by the apparently explosive development of
Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Demands upon cartographers resulting from
these modifications have expanded and to some degree reshaped their functions by
thrusting them into changing and sometimes new partnerships with other mapping
sciences and other disciplines and segments of the map using communities (Anson,
1989).
The answer, though given with hesitation sometimes, is that of integration. How far this
integration should go is still being debated amongst cartography teachers. Only a small
