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  • Selected Papers from the 26th International Cartographic Conference, Dresden, 25–30 August 2013: The Challenges of Visualization
  • Nigel Waters, Editor, Cartographica

Every two years, the International Cartographic Association (ICA) organizes the International Cartographic Conference (ICC). This year the ICC is being held in Dresden on 25–30 August. For several years the Editors of Cartographica, The Cartographic Journal (UK), and Cartography and Geographic Information Science (US) have been invited to select what they consider to be the most interesting, thought-provoking, innovative, and appropriate papers for publication in their respective journals. In Cartographica’s case, the papers, once selected, go through the usual double-blind peer-review process and, once judged acceptable, are then revised as necessary and gathered together here in this theme issue, which celebrates The Challenges of Visualization in an era of the new digital and online social-media data sources. I am most grateful to Dr Nikolas Prechtel and other members of the ICC Organizing Committee for assisting and supporting the process of article selection.

Our special issue begins with “Where Do Tourists Go? Visualizing and Analyzing the Spatial Distribution of Geo-tagged Photography” by Bálint Kádár and Mátyás Gede. These authors use 2D and 3D visualization techniques to data-mine the photo-sharing Web site Flickr to highlight the differences in spatial patterns of photographs taken by tourists and residents in Budapest. The implications of their research for recreation planning are made clear. Our second selection, “An Information Model for Pedestrian Routing and Navigation Databases Supporting Universal Accessibility” by Mari Laakso, Tapani Sarjakoski, Lassi Lehto, and L. Tiina Sarjakoski from the Finnish Geodetic Institute, uses the Unified Modelling Language to describe and visualize the physical environment for pedestrians and those with disabilities; the goal of their methodology is to increase accessibility for both groups of travellers. In “Location-Based Illustration Mapping Applications and Editing Tools,” Min Lu and Masatoshi Arikawa from the University of Tokyo explore methods for designing illustrated maps for tourists in Japan who are obtaining their information from smartphones.

Our fourth selection, “Cartographic Visualization of Vulnerability to Natural Hazards,” is contributed by Tomasz Opach and Jan Ketil Rød. These researchers, based in Norway, present different map-centred and other visualization techniques to communicate vulnerability to climate-change-induced natural disasters, such as storms and floods. The author of our fifth paper, José Jesús Reyes Nuñez, is affiliated with Eőtvős Loránd University in Budapest. Since 1999 he has been involved with the ICA’s Cartography and Children Commission, initially as a member and then as Vice Chair (2003–2007), Co-Chair (2007–2011), and Chair (since 2011). His article, titled “Smartphone-Based School Atlases?,” describes the challenges involved in adapting the content and graphics of school atlases to smartphones. He also considers the potential of using technology developed for location-based services to help adapt school atlases to smartphone screens.

One of the most widely considered topics in recent GIS research has been the role of volunteered geographic information (VGI). Our final selection, “Detecting Level-of-Detail Inconsistencies in Volunteered Geographic Information Data Sets” by Guillaume Touya and Carmen Brando-Escobar of Université Paris-Est, discusses the difficulties that arise because of heterogeneous levels of detail associated with VGI data, a problem that usually does not arise in authoritative data. Their proposed solution is to produce a methodology that infers the level of detail associated with VGI. The results of implementing this approach are presented using OpenStreetMap data.

Cartographica is particularly proud to note that the six contributions in this special issue come from a diverse group of countries around the world, including Hungary, Finland, Japan, Norway, and France. [End Page 77]

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