Third International Conference on Cartography and GIS

The third International Conference on Cartography and GIS took place in the Black Sea resort of Nessebar from 12th to 15th June 2010, following that held in January 2008 in the Bulgarian winter resort of Borovets. Despite the attractions of summer, conference participants were eager to follow presentations and the conference hall at the beach hotel Arsena was always full.

A view over Nessebar

In fact, two conferences were taking place, starting with a weekend of ‘Digital Earth'. The organisers have to be congratulated for bringing all this together. Both conferences were sponsored by ESRI, Eurosense Belgium, Intergraph and Geodis Brno (Czech Republic).

Digital Earth
The conference entitled ‘Digital Earth in the Service of Society: Sharing Information, Building Knowledge' ran from 12th to 14th June; the third ISDE digital earth summit, and meetingplace for the International Society of Digital Earth (ISDE). Nearly a hundred researchers from eleven countries registered and about forty researchers gave presentations concerning new research topics on Digital Earth science and technology. Presentations covered the societal context for Digital Earth; local, regional and global levels; sustainable development; digital cities; the citizen as contributor; and conditions for access to Digital Earth data.

3rd ICCG

The ICCG organising team

The main event, the Third International Conference on Cartography and GIS, began on 15th June with proceedings under the patronage of Kristalina Georgieva, Member of the European Commission. An opening ceremony was followed by welcomes from main organiser Dobrin Denev, rector of the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy (UACEG), Sofia; president of the international organising committee Milan Konecny of Brno University, Czech Republic; Martin Klepetko, Ambassador for the Czech Republic in Bulgaria; Nikolaj Dimitrov, Mayor of Nessebar; Eric Santkin, economic and commercial counsellor for the Belgian Embassy in Bulgaria; and Paul Hardy of ESRI Europe, representing the sponsors. The conference consisted of a mixture of scientific presentations, keynote speeches, cartographic working groups, a seminar on Early Warning and Crises Management and a workshop on Spatial Data Infrastructures. All speakers emphasised the importance of cartography and geographic information for our world.

Eastern Europe
There was a clear focus on Eastern Europe and the East, with participants from Bulgaria and other Eastern European countries, the European Union, Russia, China, Iran and South America among the 111 participants from 32 countries registered. A total of 110 presentations were given, with daily keynote speeches as highlights. Sponsor ESRI presented the company's involvement in new technology such as cloud computing and volunteered geographic information. Eurosense explained its role in a revised cartography, new data acquisition technologies and activities in disaster management. Joachim Rix of the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany, spoke about the European project eSDI-Net+ (1), a network initiative bringing together stakeholders in spatial-data infrastructures. Prof. William Cartwright, president of the International Cartographic Association (ICA), discussed a research project evaluating historical war maps, concluding that good maps were a precondition for winning a war. Assoc. Prof. T. Bandrova of the University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy in Sofia, Bulgaria, gave the history of Bulgarian cartography, with an emphasis on education in schools. Finally, Athina Trakas of OGC Europe presented in her keynote speech the importance of standards and possibilities for participation in the OGC standardisation process.

Seminar and Workshop

Participants in the SDI workshop

An important element of the conference was the Seminar with EU Cooperation on Early Warning and Disaster/Crises Management, organised by the ICA Working Group on Cartography for Early Warning and Crisis Management. Scientific presentations focused on various aspects of mapping and cartography for several types of disaster and their management. Visualisation-of-risk maps emerged as an interesting topic, their goal being to make maps better understandable by users in the case of disaster.

A Workshop on Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) was organised by the Association for Geospatial Information in South-East Europe (AGISEE) with the support of the EU funded project eSDI-Net+. Targeted were SDIs at local or regional level, and an excellent summary was given of GIS and SDI development, with an emphasis on South-East Europe; representatives of municipalities and other actors met and exchanged information. Presentations came from municipalities in Albania, Bulgaria and Turkey, and the SDI of the region of Catalonia, Spain, was given as a successful best-case example. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
(2) and the Association for Geospatial Information in South-East Europe (AGISEE)
(3) announced their co-operation in promoting the importance of open standards and raise the awareness of interoperability in South-East Europe. A mailing list has been set up to further discuss issues emerging from the workshop.

Scientific Programme
The bulk of conference consisted of scientific presentations in the area of cartography; topics covered being Cartography and GIS in Education, Internet Cartography and Digital Atlases, Map Design and Production, Cartographic Visualisation, and the speciality of this conference, Planetary Cartography. Other speakers addressed GIS Technologies and Related Disciplines, such as GIS for City Traffic, GPS Technologies, and Remote Sensing Technologies. Various papers focused on use of the internet in cartography, including aspects of collaborative mapping, neo-geography or virtual geographic information; it was an author who introduced the term ‘neo-cartography'.

Regional Strength
Closing conference, Prof. Milan Konecny remarked that it had clearly strengthened the role of cartography and of ICA in the region, and demonstrated the importance of spatial data infrastructures in bringing together data from various sources, which is also necessary for producing maps. Digital Earth was recognised as an initiative that could be very influential within cartography and provide new ideas and solutions, especially in crisis management. Overall this proved a very interesting and fruitful conference, offering many contacts and exchanges with different groups working in cartography, GIS and SDI. Detailed information and proceedings are available from the conference website, 4.