President’s Blog: A map perspective on the sustainable development goals

The Sustainable Development Goals, officially known as Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development are a UN Initiative. Official website: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org

In the light of the International Map Year (IMY), the ICA and its commissions are highlighting the value of cartography by “mapping” the UN sustainable development goals.

In the past months, a set of posters has been created, one for each sustainable development goal. They do not map the goals and their target based on indicators as such. The poster series tells the story of cartographic diversity, of mapping options, and of multiple map perspectives. Each of the goals has been mapped from a particular perspective by different ICA Commissions. All posters have a short take-home-message that should make one aware of particular strengths of the map.

The posters as well as the catalog for the poster exhibition can be found on icaci.org/maps-and-sustainable-development-goals

A huge thank you to all commissions involved and to Wim Feringa from ITC for the poster design and production. Let’s make the world a better place with maps!

Menno-Jan Kraak
– President of the International Cartographic Association

Tag: International Map Year, sustainable development goals, UN, UNGGIM

Share your ideas on future research directions in the field of LBS

The ICA Commission on Location-Based Services is currently starting an initiative to develop a cross-cutting research agenda for the field of Location-Based Services (LBS), aiming to identify key research questions and challenges that are essential for the LBS development in the next 5 or 10 years.

The details of the initiative are available at lbs.icaci.org/research-agenda

Inspired by the ICA workshop Envisioning the Future of Cartographic Research organized by several sister commissions (Cognitive Visualization, Use and User Issues, Geovisualization and Map Design), the process of producing this research agenda will be designed as a joint activity of the LBS research community:

We invite all interested parties to write a one paragraph proposal to describe what they believe are the “big problems” that should be addressed to bring LBS research on a higher level.
The commission chairs together with several invited experts will then examine, classify, and group these proposals, and provide a first list of “key problems”. The list will be circulated to the LBS research community, and we will then invite everyone to write a one-page position paper to further develop cross-cutting research directions and plans toward these “key problems”.

Important Dates:

15 July 2016, deadline for one paragraph proposals of “big problems” in LBS. Please submit your proposal here.
20 August 2016, publication of the selected “key problems” on the commission website
1 October 2016, deadline for expression of interest in writing a one-page position paper
1 November 2016, deadline for one-page position papers

We are exploring the possibility of having a workshop, preceding the LBS conference 2016 in Vienna, to discuss these position papers and the cross-cutting research directions.

We are looking forward to your input!

Haosheng Huang
– Chair of the Commission on Location-Based Services

Category: Commission News, Location Based Services

Invitation to the 13th International Conference on Location-Based Services

The ICA Commission on Location-Based Services and the Vienna University of Technology are pleased to invite you to the 13th International Conference on Location-Based Services (LBS 2016), which will take place in Vienna on November 14–16, 2016.

Built on the success of previous conferences in this series, LBS 2016 aims to offer a platform for scholars, researchers, and industry/market operators from various disciplines and practice to meet, interact and exchange knowledge, experience, plans and ideas on how LBS can and could be improved and on how it will influence both science and society.

lbs2016_background

The Call for Papers is currently open. Deadlines for submission are June 1 for full papers, July 1 for work in progress, and September 18 for showcases. High-quality submissions are intended to be published in the Journal of Location Based Services and in a book of the Springer series Lecture Notes on Geoinformation and Cartography. More information can be found at lbsconference.org.

We are looking forwards to your contributions and to meeting you in Vienna!

Haosheng Huang
– Chair of the Commission on Location-Based Services

Category: Commission News, Location Based Services

Tag: Austria, cfp

Joint ICA meeting in Vienna, November 8–9

ica-commission-meeting

All chairs and vice-chairs of the ICA commissions and working groups were invited to join an ICA meeting in Vienna on 8–9 November 2015 to plan and discuss their activities for the term 2015–2019. 46 chairs, vice-chairs and members of the executive committee followed the invitation and spent two intensive workshop days at Technische Universität Wien.

Meeting participants

Commission chairs and vice-chairs

Working Group International Map Year

Executive Committee

Website

Manuela Schmidt
ICA Webmaster

More photos of the workshop can be found on the ICA Facebook page.

Tag: Austria, commission chair meeting, executive committee, International Map Year

Review of the LBS conference 2015 in Augsburg, Germany

lbs2015

The 12th International Symposium on Location-Based Services was held in Augsburg, Germany, from 16–18 September 2015. It was addressed at researchers, industry operators and students of different backgrounds (scientific, engineering and humanistic) whose work is either focused on or affined to Location Based Services (LBS). The conference featured Alexander Zipf from Heidelberg University and Xiaolin Meng from University of Nottingham as keynote speakers. An overview over the program can be found on lbs2015.tum.de. Selected papers are planned to be published in the Journal of Location Based Services.

– Jukka M. Krisp
Vice-chair of the ICA Commission on Location-Based Services

Category: Commission News, Location Based Services

Tag: conference report, Germany

Get to know the new ICA commissions for the term 2015–2019

27 commissions and 3 working groups were elected for the term 2015–2019 by the ICA General Assembly 2015. We are currently in the process of updating the website to reflect these changes. Also some of the commissions are still preparing or updating their websites. In the meantime, we invite you to have a look at the short “Commissions at a glance” presentations, which the new commissions chairs gave during ICC 2015:

Tag: ICC2015