Chairperson
- Alan M. MacEachren,
Penn State U., Dept. of Geography, 302 Walker, University Park, PA
16802, USA; maceachren@psu.edu
Co-Chairperson
- Menno-Jan Kraak, ITC, Department of Geoinformatics,
P.O. Box 6 - 7500 AA Enschede - The Netherlands; kraak@itc.nl
Report
on Commission activities, Fall 1995 - Summer 1996
Following
approval of its terms of reference in Barcelona (September, 1995),
the commission began a series of short and long-term activities related
to its terms of reference. Among the first was to act on membership
nominations and extend specific membership invitations to a range
of individuals working on aspects of cartographic visualization. The
result is the following current roster of members and corresponding
members:
As the
process of forming the full Commission was underway, a World Wide
Web (WWW) site was established at: [http://www.geovista.psu.edu/ica/index.html]
This
site contains information concerning ongoing research and education
efforts by commission members, details of the commission's terms of
reference and the rationale for them, links to other Commissions,
and most recently, a section of working papers where commission members
and others active in exploratory cartographic visualization research
have been invited to post short electronic papers that provide an
overview of their current research in a dynamic form (more on these
papers is covered below).
A
key commission activity during this period was the initiation of a
special issue of the journal Computers & GeoSciences to be co-edited
by Alan M. MacEachren and Menno-Jan Kraak (chair and co-chair of the
commission). This special issue will be produced in both paper and
electronic format (a first for the journal). At this point, the plan
is to have the electronic version available in both a CD-ROM for (included
with the paper journal) and via the WWW. Publication is anticipated
before the Stockholm ICA meeting.
Another
significant development has been the launch of a three year collaboration
with the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group
on Graphics (ACM-SIGGRAPH). The collaboration is designed to explore
ways in which viewpoints and techniques from the computer graphics
and cartography communities can be effectively integrated in the context
of cartographic and spatial data sets. More details are included in
the special report on the "carto Project" by Theresa Rhyne,
the Commission's Liaison with ACM-SIGGRAPH
The
Commission's working group on Multimedia (chaired by William Cartwright
of RMIT) has also been active over this time period. They have begun
to develop a directory of individuals involved in research and applications
of multimedia-based cartographic visualization. More detail on their
efforts is available in their report.
