179
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
