The ICA Commission on Mapping from Satellite Imagery is responsible for educating and informing the geospatial- data handling community about the link between the raw data captured from satellite imagery and the extraction, presentation and application of information derived from such data. See previous report on this page, GIM March 2007.

ToR
The Terms of Reference of the 2007-2011 commission, approved at the Moscow ICC, August 2007, include fundamental work: “[…] analysis of existing and forthcoming satellite imagery in view of their potential inputs for producing and updating topographic and thematic maps and databases; and assessment of the cartographic capabilities of different remote sensing systems”. A further role is in developing links between ICA and the many other international agencies and organisations having interest in this area, such as UNOOSA, UNEP, PAIGH, and ISPRS. Knowledge transfer is also important, through special issues of scholarly journals and books, as is the promotion of ICA via posters and seminars at international meetings. A particular interest is contributing to policy and practice in the application of mapping and imagery to early-­warn­­­ing, disaster-mitigation, urban environmental management and natural-system monitoring. Clearly such activity also involves other ICA Commissions and Working Groups.

Knowledge Transfer
The 2005-2008 chair, Prof Graciela Metternicht, has stepped down. She has left her academic post in Australia and started with the United Nations in Panama. The new chair, Dr Xiaojun Yang, Florida State University (FSU), USA, is responsible for the Commission’s active website ( http://mailer.fsu.edu/~xyang/ica ) which presents news and archival mater­ial relating to satellite imagery for mapping. The vice-chair is Prof. Jonathan Li from the University of Waterloo, Canada. The Commission is supporting two conferences in 2008. The first took place from 28thto 30thMarch 2008 in Tallahassee, USA, and was a student-oriented meeting organised by the FSU Department of Geography, and the Society for Geospatial Sciences, (the FSU Student Chapter of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing-ASPRS). Several dozen graduates and world-class scholars attended the meeting. Dr Yang served as scientific advisor, and the keynote speaker was Dr Marguerite Madden, president of ASPRS. This conference attracted early-career researchers, mainly from the US, to their first involvement with ICA activities.

Gi4DM
The second event is the 4thInternational Symposium on Geoinformation for Disaster Management (Gi4DM), which will be held jointly with ISCRAM-CHINA in Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China, from 4thto 6thAugust. Professor Li is serving as co-chair of the Scientific Committee and the goal of Gi4DM is to promote dialogue on disaster management problems in their entirety by considering the areas both of geospatial technologies and particular user requirements for spatial data and standards.