----------------------------Original message---------------------------- This report is about 4 p. long and is being posted to both MAPS-L and CARTA. ============================================================= International Cartographic Congress '93 Koeln/Cologne One Woman's View By Alberta Auringer Wood Map Librarian Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada This meeting was officially held from May 3 through May 9, but it really began for me on May 1 when we walked over the Rhine River Hohenzollern Bridge to find the Koeln Messe Congress Centrum Ost. The conference signs were not well in evidence on that day (though they were later), and we wandered around the vast area of buildings before we found our way into the right spot. Being able to ask simple directional questions in German and understand most of the answer did help! This was thanks to Anke Tonn (one of our catalogers) helping me to refresh my university German of some thirty years ago. At this point there was no one around to ask where to put the exhibit of Canadian materials. However, we went there again on Sunday afternoon, May 2d, to rearrange some of the maps in the Canadian portion of the International Map Exhibition, to find out where the exhibit would go, and to learn that it would not be possible to put it up until Monday morning. It was put up then and a video tape player arrived as well to indicate the attractions of Ottawa as a venue for the 1999 meeting of ICA. There were also brochures to be handed out. On Sunday night, I was asked to serve as the Chair of an Ad Hoc Committee to select the finalists in the Barbara Bartz Petchenik Children's Map Competition. This was a world-wide competition for children to prepare a world map and was in memory of Dr. Petchenik who died last June of cancer. She had a great interest in mapping done by children. The other members of the committee were Wanarat Thothong (Thailand), Ernoe Csati (Hungary), Corne van Elzakker (The Netherlands), and Jon Kimerling (U.S.A.). I managed to talk to all of them by Tuesday morning about our task, and then we met on Friday morning to come up with our list of the ten the committee liked best. We had been charged to try to choose one from each continent, but no maps were submitted from Africa. Many hundreds of maps had been submitted, but we were selecting from 76 semi-finalists chosen by the ICA Executive. When polling the committee selections we found that we had listed 32 different maps among us. From these we eventually chose submissions from Sri Lanka, Brazil, U.S.A., U.K., Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Japan, and Indonesia as the ten finalists. These maps will be submitted to UNICEF as suggestions from which to choose a greeting card. Among the maps not making this list was a submission by the five year old grandson of Dr. Petchenik. At the closing ceremony on Saturday afternoon, May 8th, I had to report on these selections. The maps chosen exhibited a global view, showed imagination, creativity, and uniqueness, as well as some artistic skill. On Monday, 3 May, I spent nearly the entire day at meetings of the ICA Working Group on Gender in Cartography. There was a business meeting chaired by Eva Siekierska of Energy, Mines and Resources Canada and attended by about ten or twelve women cartographers from around the world. The first draft of a Directory of Women in Cartography, Surveying, and GIS was handed out, with a request for updating and correcting, as was a diskette with the database containing the results of the survey on women in cartography. The directory is to be sent to all the women who responded to the survey request and agreed to have their names listed. Carol Beaver reported on her attendance at a United Nations conference on cartography where she prepared a report for that group based upon the results of this working group's survey. Sweden will be sending out copies of the report which is being supported by the Norwegian mapping agency. The next meeting of the group is tentatively planned for May 1994, possibly in Istanbul. In the early afternoon, there was a workshop presented by Donna Williams of the National Atlas Information Service, Canada, on gender and its influences. From 4:00 to 5:30 pm, there was on open meeting of the working group that was attended by about 30 or more people, including one of the ICA Vice Presidents, Michael Wood from the U.K., who is the Executive Liaison to the committee. It was noted that the group is to represent women, younger cartographers and those from developing countries. At some point, I looked through the list of participants and estimated that about 25% of those listed were women. During the open meeting a representative from the Norwegian Society indicated that their group is about 10% women. The meeting was held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual German Cartographers' Meeting (42. Deutscher Kartographentag) and there was a joint opening ceremony. Welcomes were given by Norbert Burger the Mayor of Cologne; Fraser Taylor the ICA President; Ulrich Freitag the German society president; Frederick Wilhelm Held, on behalf of the Government of North Rhine-Westfalia; Hugh O'Donnell as Secretary General of the International Union of Surveys and Mapping on behalf of the international sister organizations; and Franz K. List, President of the German Society of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing on behalf of the German sister organizations. The Mercator medal of the German Society for Cartography was awarded to Jacques Bertin, Paris, by Ulrich Freitag. This award of the German society is for outstanding achievement in cartography and was awarded for the second time. The keynote address was given by David Rhind, Director General of the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain, on "Mapping in the New Millenium". He concentrated on the European situation and gave examples based upon the Ordnance Survey. He noted that we must assume that the computer is a fundamental part of what we are doing. He expects great expansion of cartographic activities in Europe in the next three years. For the long term, he felt that there would be much wider use of GIS, especially by non-traditional users, that there would be computer networking, and that there would be much greater international competition, among other things. He somewhat gloomily concluded that cartography will prosper, but not cartographers. The ICA paper sessions numbered twenty-one containing 126 papers while the German society had an additional four sessions with eight papers. For two of the days, there were four concurrent sessions, and on the other three days, there were three such sessions, so it was impossible to get to all the papers! There were also 37 poster presentations. Fortunately, most of the papers, though not all, were included in the two volume proceedings for the congress. The topics of the ICA sessions were: New Tasks, New Techniques, New Terms I and II; Navigation System, Tourism Cartography; Mapping Statistics; Neural Nets, Cartographic Generalization; Mass Media Cartography; Mapping Land Use; Knowledge-based Mapping Systems; Maps for Protection and Disaster Prevention; Map Based Information Systems I, II, III, IV, and V; Atlas Cartography I and II; Cartography Modelling of Geographic Information, Map Revision; Space and Map Perception and Language Representation; Space and Map Perception, Cartographic Design; Interactive and Educational Cartography; Marketing Cartographic Data; Multi Media Displays and Hypermapping. The topics of the German society sessions were: Topographische Kartographie; Thematische Kartographie; Kartographie und Geoinformation; and Berufsfeld de Kartographie. In addition, several of the commissions held open special meetings where their members gave papers. There was an enormous international map exhibition with 40 countries represented, as well as separate ones on cartography in Germany and in the European region. Other special topic exhibits were education cartography (maps by students, young scientists, and apprentices), tactile maps, maps in advertising, and Cologne and the Rhineland in historical maps. An exhibition catalogue was prepared and distributed to conference registrants. President Taylor appointed an ad hoc committee to chose the six "best" maps from the international map exhibit. One "winning" map was from Canada, "The Circumpolar Map of Quaternary Deposits of the Arctic" distributed by the Geological Survey of Canada and done in cooperation with the Russians. The other maps were a Swiss map of Mt. Everest, a map of Soho from the U.K., a Spanish map of Catalonya, a Norwegian map of Antarctica, and a Russian topographic map at a scale of 1:200 000. Exact citations available upon request! At the same time as the cartographic congresses were going on, the Koeln Messe and the Alfred-Wegener Foundation held the second "geotechnica" or International Trade Fair and Congress for Geo- Sciences and Technology in the Congress Centrum West. Over 500 companies displayed their products and examples of their work and services. Canada and the U.S. were well represented. Our registration gave us access to this somewhat overwhelming and huge exhibit hall. The conference was rounded out by a variety of social events, such as receptions, an organ concert in the magnificent Cologne cathedral, music along with opening and closing ceremonies, an elegant banquet with delicious food, several tours of the local area and mapping agencies, and for those who stayed till the last day, a boat tour of the Rhine River from Bingen to Koblenz and a walking tour of Koblenz. Travel to Bingen and from Koblenz was by train, very comfortable and smooth. The weather that day was lovely, too, though it had been mixed and somewhat cool during the week. Some of us got thoroughly soaked walking back across the Hohenzollern Bridge on Saturday night when a late afternoon thunderstorm struck with drenching rain and hail! We enjoyed the rest of the evening nonetheless. It was a good conference for visiting with old friends and making new ones, despite there not being a central conference hotel. We were spread all over the city and the surrounding countryside in hotels, big and small, as well as in bed and breakfast establishments. The restaurant and hotel food was generally good, though expensive, as was everything else. People came and went from the conference by plane, train, boat, car, and even motorcycle!