Research outcomes from the international Cartography and GIScience community

We have now published eight editions of the Journal, and we believe that this has contributed positively to the International Cartographic Association’s goal of advancing Cartography and GI Science. The International Journal of Cartography has been accepted for inclusion in Scopus. In the acceptance letter, reference was made to the following reviewer comments: (1) The journal consistently includes articles that are scientifically sound and relevant to an international academic or professional audience in this field; and (2) This title addresses a subject area not properly covered by an existing journal. This first issue for 2023 continues the Journal’s function as a conduit for communicating the outcomes of research and development by members of the international Cartography and GIScience community. It is indeed a pleasure, as Editors, to be able to read papers that report on the findings from research, sometimes undertaken over many years by collaborative teams endeavouring to better understand complex Cartography and GIScience problems, and to find solutions to those problems. The papers herein illustrate the breadth and depth of research undertakings. Topics addressed range from: map-reading skills; the engraving of historical maps; Soviet-era city plans; local-scale terrain studies; map-based dashboard design; and the evaluation of a conceptual model of an evocative place. Leilani A. Arthurs, Sarah P. Baumann, Joel M. Rice & Shelby Dianne Litton, in their contribution, The Development of Individuals’ Map-Reading Skill: What Research and Theory Tell Us, addressed the question: ‘How do individuals develop map-reading skill from childhood to adulthood?’. Their research analysed articles related to ‘Fischer’s skill theory’ and subsequently developed a theory of map-reading skill development. The Second Engraver of the Mercator-Thevet Map, by A. Terry Bahill, reports on research undertaken to identify the two engravers of a map held by the US Library of Congress accredited to Gerald Mercator and André Thevet (1569). Martin Davis’s and Alexander Kent’s research analysed symbology from the global mapping initiatives of Soviet 1:10,000 city plans of La Paz, Bolivia (1977), Port-au-Prince, Haiti (1983) and Frankfurt am Main, West Germany (1983). It compared the symbology employed in the Soviet maps with contemporary OpenStreetMap coverage of the same cities. Their paper, Soviet city plans and OpenStreetMap: a comparative analysis, reports that results from the research indicate that Soviet and OSM symbologies are similarly comprehensive regarding some topographic features, but dissimilar in the way that physical and urban environments are portrayed. Use of Cartosat-1 elevation data for local-scale terrain studies in India: A case study by Rahul Ranade describes the application of CartoDEM to develop a coarse geographic narrative of the terrain at the tehsil level. This was undertaken in a study area in Udaipur district of Rajasthan, India. Chenyu Zuo, Linfang Ding, Xiaoyu Liu, Hui Zhang and Liqiu Meng contribute a paper entitled Map-based Dashboard Design with Open Government Data for Learning and Analysis of Industrial Innovation Environment. Their paper reports that they designed and implemented a map-based dashboard – InDash – to represent spatial and semantic information of the industrial innovation environment at different levels of detail. Twenty-four relevant factors – from