The new issue of the International Journal of Cartography is now available on the Journal website. 

A synopsis of papers published in the issue is provided below.

• The contributions in this Issue begins with a paper from Jason Van Horn, entitled Erwin Raisz Plan to Advance Academic Cartography in the United States.  Van Horn notes that “Erwin Raisz represents the vanguard of early Twentieth Century American cartography.”  The paper covers Raisz’s plans to build academic cartography as its own sub-discipline in geography.  It examines his strategy and how his 1938 textbook, General Cartography, acted as a catalyst for the establishment of new courses in Cartography. The paper also covers how he continued to champion the further development of cartographic programmes.
• Uncovering urban circadian pulses based on an animated cartogram: the example of Bogotá by Hugo Thomas & Florent Demoraes describes a dynamic map that shows the differing location of ‘day’ and ‘night’ populations and how they balance over a 24 hour period. This was done using a smoothed animated cartogram of the Bogotá metropolitan area in Colombia.  The main goal of the project was to provide visual effectiveness.
• Marina Viličić and Miljenko Lapaine contribute the paper Determining the Scale and Map Projection of Stjepan Glavač’s Map from 1673.  The authors consider this map to be an exceptionally important part of Croatian cultural heritage due to its uniqueness and the detailed depiction of Croatian regions. From the relationship between the coordinates from the map, the authors concluded that Glavač used the equidistant cylindrical projection with the equator as a standard parallel.  The paper concludes with the calculation of the interval of the numerical scale of the map, enabling them to refute and/or accept the theses of other authors who have cited different scales of Glavač’s map.
• Ruud Stelten’s paper, The Caribbean’s mythical Aves Bank, addresses the cartographic myth of the Aves Bank, a long and narrow submarine bank that connected Aves Island with Saba and St. Eustatius.  This is one of many fictitious topographic elements introduced into early maps and charts of the Caribbean. The Aves Bank myth came about in the 1720s and was adopted by many cartographers, who included it in their maps and charts. The paper reports on the research undertaken by Stelten on this Caribbean cartographic myth.
• Stefan Fuest, Olga Shkedova & Monika Sester offer information on their approach for promoting routes that reduce exposure of road users to areas that should be temporarily avoided due to traffic related or environmental reasons. Promoting favorable routes through visual communication: A design study for creating route maps for the case of air pollution outlines their method, that recommends routes be calculated as the shortest path while minimizing the current concentrations of particulate matter along the route.  They proposed seven different visualization variants for representing line and areal objects in a route map that visualize route options based on pollution levels.
• Certain arguments against the hypothesis that portolan charts were genuine late-medieval cartographic products by Tome Marelić reports on a series of tests conducted on sample of 12 representations of the Adriatic Sea on portolan charts, created between the late 13th and the late 16^th century.  This was done to examine their navigational applicability. By-products of their results strongly suggest that it is impossible that portolan charts were, in terms of their geometry, genuine late-medieval cartographic products.
• Miljenko Lapaine, in his paper, A Problem in Basic Cartography offers proof that standard parallels and secant parallels generally do not match. He argues that that the widely accepted facts about secant and standard parallels are wrong and need to be revised. Further, he explains that cylindrical projections are not a good approach, as they lead to misunderstanding important properties of projection.
• The Issue concludes with the Invited essay: MAPS IN HISTORY by Imre Demhardt. The topic of this essay is Richard Harrison as media cartographer.
• Two book reviews are also included:
  • New directions in radical cartography: Why the map is never the territory edited by Phil Cohen and Mike Duggan, Landham, Maryland, US, Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Review by Peter Vujakovic.
  • Atlas of the Invisible: Maps & Graphics That Will Change How You See The World by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti. Review by Antoni Moore.

Papers can be viewed via the Journal website.

Bill Cartwright and Anne Ruas
Editors, International Journal of Cartography

The new issue of the International Journal of Cartography is now available on the Journal website. 

The list of papers published is provided below:

• Editorial – New directions for the state of the art and science in Cartography
  Anthony C. Robinson, Pyry Kettunen, Luciene Delazari and Arzu Çöltekin
• Potential of eye-tracking for interactive geovisual exploration aided by machine learning (Open Access)
  Merve Keskin & Pyry Kettunen
• Moving Indoors: A Systematic Literature Review of Locomotion in Virtual Indoor Environments
  Pavel Pospíšil
• Study about the appropriate number of participants in map user studies
  Vinicius Bergmann Martins, Fabrício Rosa Amorim, Marcio Augusto Reolon Schmidt & Luciene Stamato Delazari
• Cartography & Geovisual Analytics in Personal Contexts: Designing for the Data Creator (Open Access)
  Jonathan Nelson
• Eye-tracking in map use, map user and map usability research: what are we looking for? (Open Access)
  David Fairbairn and Jessica Hepburn
• Missing the City for Buildings? A Critical Review of Pan-Scalar Map Generalization and Design in Contemporary Zoomable Maps
  Maieul Gruget, Guillaume Touya and Ian Muehlenhaus.
• Using Geovisual Analytics to Enrich Conservation Science: A Review of Interactive Visualization of Wildlife Movement and Environmental Spatial Data Across Ecosystems
  Lindsay Lacey and Jonathan Nelson
• Minimum Dimensions for Cartographic Symbology – History, Rationale and Relevance in the Digital Age (Open Access)
  Florian Ledermann
• Incorporating Ideas of Structure and Meaning in Interactive Multi Scale Mapping Environments
  Guillaume Touya, Quentin Potie and William A. Mackaness
• Cartographic perspectives on spatial and thematic levels of detail in augmented reality: a review of existing approaches
  Niki Anastopoulou, Margarita Kolka, Eleni Tomai, Kostas Cheliotis, Fotis Liarokapis, Katerina Pastra and Marinos Kavouras
• How we see time — The Evolution and Current State of Visualizations of Temporal Data (Open Access)
  Verena Klasen, Edyta P. Bogucka, Liqiu Meng & Jukka M. Krisp

Also, you may have papers that you might wish to publish in the Journal. We would welcome the submission of appropriate papers.

William Cartwright, Melbourne, Australia
Anne Ruas, Paris, France
Editors, International Journal of Cartography

The new issue of the International Journal of Cartography is now available on the Journal website. 

The list of papers published is provided below:

• Leilani A. Arthurs, Sarah P. Baumann, Joel M. Rice & Shelby Dianne Litton, in their contribution, The Development of Individuals’ Map-Reading Skill: What Research and Theory Tell Us, addressed the question: “How do individuals develop map-reading skill from childhood to adulthood?”.  Their research analysed articles related to ‘Fischer’s skill theory’ and subsequently developed a theory of map-reading skill development.
• The Second Engraver of the Mercator-Thevet Map, by A. Terry Bahill, reports on research undertaken to identify the two engravers of a map held by the US Library of Congress accredited to Gerald Mercator and André Thevet (1569).
• Martin Davis’s and Alexander Kent’s research analysed symbology from the global mapping initiatives of Soviet 1:10,000 city plans of La Paz, Bolivia (1977), Port-au-Prince, Haiti (1983) and Frankfurt am Main, West Germany (1983).  It compared the symbology employed in the Soviet maps with contemporary OpenStreetMap coverage of the same cities.  Their paper, Soviet city plans and OpenStreetMap: a comparative analysis, reports that results from the research indicate that Soviet and OSM symbologies are similarly comprehensive regarding some topographic features, but dissimilar in the way that physical and urban environments are portrayed.
• Use of Cartosat-1 elevation data for local-scale terrain studies in India: A case study by Rahul Ranade describes the application of CartoDEM to develop a coarse geographic narrative of the terrain at the tehsil level.  This was undertaken in a study area in Udaipur district of Rajasthan, India.
• Chenyu Zuo, Linfang Ding, Xiaoyu Liu, Hui Zhang and Liqiu Meng contribute a paper entitled Map-based Dashboard Design with Open Government Data for Learning and Analysis of Industrial Innovation Environment. Their paper reports that they designed and implemented a map-based dashboard – InDash – to represent spatial and semantic information of the industrial innovation environment at different levels of detail. Twenty-four relevant factors –  from economy, habitation, infrastructure, and research & development – were employed to illustrate the design.
• Well-Being Evocative Places: Validating the Conceptual Model of an Evocative Place Based on the Inter-Rater Reliability Test by Alenka Poplin, Erin Duffer and Georg Gartner complete the research papers in this issue.  Here, data was collected relating to evocative places – places that evoke emotions, memories and images – and descriptions were collected in a series of mapping experiments undertaken in three cities. The Conceptual Model of an Evocative Place (CMEP) was designed based on the collected data from the three cities studied.  It was then evaluated using the Inter-Rater Reliability test as a framework.
• As is usual in all issues of this Journal we include an Invited essay from Imre Demhardt.  His piece in this issue is entitled: Allegorical Maps in human shapes.

Two Book Reviews are also included:

• Visual analytics for data scientists by Natalia Andrienko, Gennady Andrienko, Georg Fuchs, Aidan Slingsby, Cagatay Turkay and Stefan Wrobel, Springer International Publishing (Switzerland), 2021, 440 pp., GBP 75 (hardback) ISBN 9783030561451. Reviewed by Sarah Battersby.
• Newcastle Upon Tyne: Mapping the City by Michael Barke, Brian Robson and Anthony Champion, Edinburgh, Birlinn, 2021, GBP 30 (hardback)  ISBN 9781780277264. Reviewed by Peter Vujakovic.

Also, you may have papers that you might wish to publish in the Journal. We would welcome the submission of appropriate papers.

William Cartwright, Melbourne, Australia
Anne Ruas, Paris, France
Editors, International Journal of Cartography

The Special Issue of the International Journal of Cartography: Issue 7.3, 2021 Special Issue ICC2021, Florence, Italy – part 1, is now published on-line. The print version of the issue will follow this.

Two Special Issues will be published to coincide with the conference: Issue 7.3 2021 (this issue) and Issue 8.1 2022. As the conference will take place in December 2021, all Special Issue papers will be published on-line before the Conference takes place, with print issues to follow.

Editorial: The International Cartographic Conference 2021 – Firenze, Italy: a truly wonderful occasion to celebrate the outcomes and advances of international collaboration and the resilience of Italian Cartographers

The international Cartography and GIScience community were gratified to receive news that the 2021 International Cartographic Conference would take place in Firenze, Italy between 14-18 December, in spite of the many hurdles that had to be overcome by the Associazione Italiana di Cartografia to ensure that this important event took place in this time of global disruption and uncertainty due to COVID-19. Our Italian colleagues are to be congratulated on their dedicated and diligent endeavours to ensure that the International Cartographic Association’s community will be able to meet and advance the theory and praxis of Cartography and GIScience.

The Journal editors worked closely with the Conference Publications Chair, Professor Paola Zamperlin of the Università di Pisa to progress papers for review and potential publishing. Selected papers submitted for the ‘Advances in Cartography’ publishing route for ICC2021 were considered for publication in the Special Issues of the Journal. Ninety-nine full papers were submitted to the ‘Advances’ publishing route. These papers were reviewed initially by the conference LOC, and evaluated by both national and international reviewers. After these reviews were complete and the outcomes considered by the LOC, selected papers were recommended to us for consideration for further review, with the potential of publishing in the Journal. Twenty-four selected papers were recommended by the LOC to the IJC editors. From these papers, sixteen papers were identified for consideration and a further two blind reviews were conducted on these papers. The papers published in Issue 7.3, 2021 and Issue 8.1, 2022 were realised by this process. We thank all LOC reviewers and Journal reviewers for their support of the review process, the Journal and, more broadly, the researchers whose work that advances the research goals of the International Cartographic Association are reported upon in these Special Issues of the Journal.

The papers herein begin with a contribution by Radek Barvir and Vit Vozenilek, with their contribution entitled Graphic map load measuring tool – development and verification. They explain that ‘Map load’ is a map property quantifying the amount of map content in cartographic products. This paper presents information about an easy-to-use and freely available tool GMLMT (Graphic Map Load Measuring Tool) that applies a metric averaging of the amount of visible structures in a map using an edge-detection approach to measure graphic map load of raster representations of maps. The process of designing the tool is described and the outcomes of their experiments is reported.

This is followed by the paper Spatial thinking in cartography teaching for schoolchildren by Sônia Maria Vanzella Castellar and Barbara Gomes Flaire Jordão. The paper provides the results of a study that investigated school teaching practises that relate spatial thinking with the learning of maps from a cartographic education perspective. The study was undertaken to support further research on school cartography and the use of digital cartographic resources in formal and informal teaching situations.

David Fairbairn, Georg Gartner and Mike Peterson examine the distinctiveness of the discipline of cartography and the success of the human endeavour that has produced maps. This paper is entitled Epistemological thoughts on the success of maps and the role of cartography. The authors argue that not only that cartography is a coherent and distinctive discipline, but that human society cannot function without maps. The paper concludes with pointers to the functional definition of the map.

Evaluating a location-based game to support citizens situated reflection on history: A mixed method approach is contributed by Catherine Jones. Catherine’s paper describes the process and findings of a critical evaluation conducted for a custom-made Location Based Game, designed to support reflection on social history. A ‘Think-aloud’ protocol was used in an evaluation in Valletta, Malta and adapted to the ‘Remind study’ protocol to explore participant experience in Luxembourg.

All of the issues of the International Journal of Cartography include a Column, entitled MAPS IN HISTORY, contributed by Imre Demhardt. In this issue, Professor Demhardt provides a timely column on the Renaissance frescoed map of Tuscany. This article describes the first 31 of 54 map-decorated cabinet fronts of the then known world in the Sala della Carte Geografiche in Palazzo Vecchio painted by Egnazio Danti in 1563–1575.

The International Journal of Cartography, since its launch some 7 years ago, has been committed to realising the publication of selected research papers submitted to the review stream of International Cartographic Conferences. As the conference will take place in December 2021, the two Special Issues are to be published to coincide with the conference are Issue 7.3 2021 (this issue) and Issue 8.1 2022. All on-line versions of the papers were published in 2021. The print version of Issue 7.3 will be published in 2021 and Issue 8.1 in 2022. (As is the case with all of our issues, the on-line versions of papers are published first, then the print versions.)

The international Cartography and GIScience community are indebted members of the Associazione Italiana di Cartografia and the conference team, led by Professor Giuseppe Scanu, for their unwavering commitment to ensure that ICC2021, a truly wonderful occasion, will take place in Firenze in December 2021.

William Cartwright, Anne Ruas and Paola Zamperlin
Melbourne | Paris | Pisa

The new issue of the International Journal of Cartography is now published online. 

Editorial: Cartographers Write About Cartography

The year 2020, and the COVID-19 virus presented challenges for communities worldwide.  Our Cartography and GIScience international ‘family’ was not immune to the impacts of health issues, movement restrictions and the need to operate altogether differently to what we had done in the past.  One of the impacts of restricted travel has been the re-scheduling of the ICA conference ICC2021 from June to December 2021. At the time of writing there’s hope, but not yet certainty that we can meet in person in December.

We thought that we would ‘re-position’ one of the issues of the International Journal of Cartography to provide a way that members of our international community could continue discourse about our discipline during this ‘hiatus’ in face-to-face international cartographic activities.

We have therefore allocated this second edition (7.2) for 2021 to a series of ‘invited essays’, where we invited a number of Cartographers to write about Cartography – personal essays on a particular map, geospatial product, or cartographic issue.  We (deliberately) asked invited contributors to write a short, illustrated essay, rather than a formal paper, so as to be able to express the qualities they saw as being important in a particular artefact. These are very much personal reflections.

We were interested in developing a publication that explored what we think about certain maps that move and inspire us – as cartographers and designers, as geospatial scientists and geographers.

When we look at some maps or atlases we sometimes just ‘like them’, or think they ‘work’.  They are something special.  They can work, artistically, scientifically, technically – or in all three of these areas. We generally limit our appreciation to some ‘note to self’ or by commenting about the artefact we admire to a close friend or colleague, or by a brief comment on social media.  We very rarely express our longer-form thoughts about them to a wider audience.

We believe that this Special Issue has provided the vehicle for this to occur, at least for the small proportion of cartographic works on show.

The authors that contributed to this Special Issue of the Journal were asked to pen a personal illustrated essay. We asked them to explain why their chosen map or cartographic artefact works and to provide an analysis of the attributes of the product that they believed make it successful.  Here, they were asked to emphasise why it works, even though this was perhaps a personal viewpoint, unsupported by analytical research.  If in fact why it works cannot be pinpointed, the author’s personal viewpoint was sought. (Our thinking was that maybe what they were writing about was considered to be like a piece of art – “it’s just great, but I don’t know why it works”.)

When compiling our list of ‘invitees’ we were faced with a dilemma: our discipline is one that is rich with well-respected, talented and innovative researchers and practitioners.  Looking at what they have done, and continue to do, is truly amazing.  We would have liked to invite them all!  However, our issue page limit disallowed this. So, we invited potential contributors to enable a representation of  the diverse nature of the areas of endeavour in our field, hailing from many parts of the globe, being at different stages of their careers and, importantly for us, as editors, be willing to join us on this journey.  We are glad to report that we received much interest and encouragement from invited authors, who were keen to share their passion for maps, in their many forms and applications.  The enthusiastic support from contributors confirmed our thinking that an issue like this, with a focus on personal observations of maps, would make a wonderful vehicle for promoting conversations about our field of endeavour.

We believe that this collection of essays will make an important contribution to the contemporary literature on cartography and GI science and promote discourse on these maps and cartographic artefacts. We hope it will generate pleasure and stimulate creativity. Further, that in exploring cartographic work in this way we might encourage similar approaches to other work, acknowledging the value of personal perspectives and opinion as much as scholarly critique. Both have value.

William Cartwright, Melbourne, Australia
Anne Ruas, Paris, France
Kenneth Field, Redlands, United States of America
Editors, International Journal of Cartography Special Issue – Cartographers write about Cartography

The contents of the issue are:

• Editorial: Cartographers Write About Cartography by William Cartwright, Anne Ruas and Kenneth Field
• The Heart of the Grand Canyon by Tom Patterson
• OCTOPUS MAPPING one of the MADMAPS: NATO Octopus, control over the weapons’ sales by Christine Zanin and Nicolas Lambert
• The Mediterranean Basin Map Designed by Michel Morel by Anne Ruas
• Peeling back the layers of a school wall map: Brunhes-Deffontaines “France Forestière” by Nicholas Chrisman
• The Unicorn of Map Projections by Sarah Battersby
• Reinhard Maack and the Brandberg (Namibia) by Imre Demhardt
• Linear and Painterly Expression in Topographic Works of Art during the Enlightenment by Beata Medyńska-Gulij
• UNVEILING SOUTHERN AFRICA: JOHN BARROW’S MAP OF 1801 by Elri Liebenburg
• Reorienting the Narrative: Chapin Jr.’s “Red China” Map by Ian Muehlenhaus
• The Geologic Map of the Cassini Quadrangle on the Moon: Planetary Cartography Between Science, Efficacy and Cartographic Aesthetics by Andrea Naß and Stephan van Gasselt
• Revealing the value of geospatial information with isochrone maps for improving the management of heart attacks in South Africa by Serena Coetzee, Lourens Snyman and Rhena Delport
• Map as biography: maps, memory, and landscape – thoughts on Ordnance Survey map, Sheet TR04, 1:25,000 Provisional Edition, Ashford. by Peter Vujakovic
• Interactive Videodiscs: Beginnings of Multimedia and Catalyst for Multimedia Cartography by William Cartwright
• The best map ever? by Menno-Jan Kraak
• Cartography Is Here. [full stop] by Igor Drecki
• My first Atlas by Carla Cristina Reinaldo Gimenes de Sena
  Graphical-statistical Atlas of Switzerland, 1914 by Thomas Schultz
• Matthew Picton’s Urban Narratives. Or how a three-dimensional paper map can beam you into the London bombing nights of 1940 by Thomas Streifeneder and Barbara Piatti
• Seeing the “perfect world” through Heinrich Berann’s Panorama Maps of the Alps by Georg Gartner
• The Soviet Military 1:10,000 City Plan of Dover, UK (1974) by Alexander Kent
• Reflections on the creation of cartographic expression through the representation of elevation by Takashi Morita
• Separating fact from fiction: the mythology of cartographic icons by Kenneth Field
• Measuring geodetic baselines in Spain during the 1850’s by Andrés Arístegui
• MapQuest and the beginnings of Web Cartography by Michael Peterson

International Journal of Cartography
Special Issue: Cartographers write about Cartography
Number 2 Volume 7 2021
ISSN:2372-9333

The new issue of the International Journal of Cartography is now published online. 

The contents of the issue are:

• Editorial: Maps – essential information resources for integration, analysis and informing   William Cartwright & Anne Ruas
• A year like no other – the ICA during the pandemic   Tim Trainor
• The 1705 van Delft expedition to northern Australia: a toponymic perspective   Jan Tent
• Famous charts and forgotten fragments: exploring correlations in early Portuguese nautical cartography   Bruno Almeida
• Strengthening resilience in the Caribbean region through the Spatial Data Infrastructures   Paloma Merodio Gómez, Efrain Limones García & Andrea Ramírez Santiago
• Minimum-error world map projections defined by polydimensional meshes   Justin H. Kunimune
• Automating and utilising equal-distribution data classification   Gennady Andrienko, Natalia Andrienko, Ibad Kureshi, Kieran Lee, Ian Smith & Toni Staykova
• Maps in History: Fighting Epidemics   Imre Josef Demhardt

Editorial: Maps – essential information resources for integration, analysis and informing

We currently live in a most awful time.  We are threatened by an invisible killer that we, as individuals and communities, must work hard to avoid, eliminate and, hopefully, eradicate.  To help us to better understand our local situation, about infections nearby, and the global situation we, as individuals, can source information from both local and global news services and publications.  This information that informs us generally includes infographics and maps.  These graphical, and geo-graphical information communication methods support and enhance the information that we mostly receive through the written word and tabulated number counts.

Data provided by  esteemed medical research facilities and governmental agencies are the sources for mapped information. For example, The New York Times provides information on the COVID-19 virus information via their ‘Coronavirus World map: Tracking the Global Outbreak” website.  Infographics and maps (generated via Mapbox), includes global information on hot spots, total cases, deaths and virus cases per capita (country-by-country).  The site brings-together information from local governments, The Center for Systems Science and Engineering at John Hopkins University, the National Health Commission of the PRC and the Wold Health Organisation. And, for the USA, the newspaper provides similar virus-related data (again using infographics and maps) on a state-by-state and county basis: trends in virus growth, vaccine rollout figures and the national situation generally.  This is repeated in a similar fashion by other major internationally-respected newspapers, as well as news services like Bloomberg, Reuters, BBC, CNN and France 24.   As well, our local newspapers and television news reports provide similar, more focussed information.  Maps are prominent in these news stories and reports, and they are used to inform us about the geographical reach of COVID-19.

It’s times like these that we need to better understand the impact of COVID-19 and the efforts being made to confront this challenge to humanity. Mapping has, and is, playing a major role for information collection, integration, analysis and informing. This utilisation of contemporary mapping services, whereby data can be sourced globally, and then presented to citizens, via print or digital media, illustrates the power of these mediums to better provide tools for decision-makers and to inform the general public.

In this issue, as part of the on-going column: Maps in history, Imre Demhardt provides some context about the use of maps as a tool for managing epidemics and developing strategic responses and spatially-informed strategies in his contribution,  ‘Fighting Epidemics’.  Professor Demhardt notes in his article that it wasn’t until the seventeenth century that printed maps were used as a tool to fight epidemics.  He provides examples from Bari on the Apulian coast of the Adriatic in the then Kingdom of Naples in 1690, New York City in 1795 and 1797 and London, 1849 and 1854.  This piece illustrates the usefulness of maps, historically, and we can reflect upon their usefulness today.

Other papers in this edition include a contribution from Jan Trent  – The 1705 van Delft expedition to northern Australia: A toponymic perspective.  The paper outlines the 1705 voyage of Dutch explorer Maerten van Delft, and the examination of the subsequent manuscript chart and report by two Councillors of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Batavia. The paper reports on the findings of research that was undertaken to compare the differences between the two historic records and motivations behind the naming of locations.

Bruno Almeida provides another historically-focussed paper – Famous Charts and Forgotten Fragments: Exploring Correlations in Early Portuguese Nautical Cartography.  Research was undertaken to ascertain the links between two anonymous early sixteenth century portolan charts: the portolan chart at the Bibliothèque Municipale of Dijon and a fragment of a chart from the Archive at Torre do Tombo, Lisbon.  As well, the research investigated the links between these two charts and the Kunstmann III chart.  This was completed using a comparative study and cartometric methods to access their implicit geometry.

Strengthening resilience in the Caribbean region through the spatial data infrastructures, by Andrea Paloma Merodio Gómez, Efrain Limones García & Andrea Ramírez Santiago provides information relating to the methodology and the results from the assessment of the initial status of the SDIs of the member of the Association of Caribbean States.  The research undertaken also assessed the activities carried out for Strengthening these National SDIs, user satisfaction of improvements that had been made and provided recommendations for strengthening the use of geospatial information for regional decision-making.

Justin H. Kunimune, in his paper Minimum-error world map projections defined by polydimensional meshes, presents a method that uses multi-dimensional optimization to optimize piecewise map projections, based on interpolation onto unstructured meshes.  These map projections are presented as the Danseiji projections, along with their potential applications. The results of the research reported are demonstrated using several new map projections. These map projections are presented as the Danseiji projections, along with their potential applications.

Equal-distribution data classification for studying relationships between spatial phenomena, is contributed by Gennady Andrienko, Natalia Andrienko, Ibad Kureshi, Kieran Lee, Ian Smith and Toni Staykova.  The paper outlines and develops their proposal of a data classification method for choropleth maps that defines intervals so that some quantity represented by values of another attribute is equally distributed among the classes. They consider that this approach may be most useful when the distribution of the phenomenon is very unequal, with many data items having zero or low quantities and quite a few items having larger quantities.  The method developed is demonstrated by analysing data that referred to a set of spatially distributed people (patients) in relationship to characteristics of the areas where they are domiciled.

William Cartwright, Melbourne, Australia
Anne Ruas, Paris, France
Editors, International Journal of Cartography