The need for disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and scientific societies - the cartographic perspective

ABSTRACT

Do we still need Cartography? Do we still need a cartographic society? These questions, which can also be transferred to other disciplines, are answered from disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives – which creates an ideal connection to the networked and interdisciplinary thinking of Gottfried Konecny. The need for Cartography as a discipline is discussed based on a view on historic, current and future functions of maps and changing research and development requirements. With respect to interdisciplinarity, Cartography shows connections to various domains while more and more relationships with young areas from the field of Computer Science are developing. With regard to cartographic societies, their central role and importance as networking platforms are emphasized. Nevertheless, geographical and thematic granularities of societies as well as networking formats (including online versions) need to be evaluated and further developed on a constant basis.

KEYWORDS:

• Cartography
• map functions
• interdisciplinarity
• data classification
• point generalization
• professional societies

Acknowledgments

Thanks to M.Sc. Juiwen Chang for programming and outputs within the aChor project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data and Method Availability Statement

Data set presented in fig. 1 (deprive index of Hamburg, 2016) is open data: http://suche.transparenz.hamburg.de/dataset/sozialmonitoring-integrierte-stadtteilentwicklung-bericht-2016-anhang

Methods for the project aChor (section 3.2; fig. 1) are available under the GitHub account: https://github.com/Ariel505/aChor

Additional information

Funding

Projects mentioned in this contribution are aChor (funded by German Research Foundation, DFG) and TOVIP (funded by German Research Foundation, DFG, under the Priority program “VGI Science”)

Notes on contributors

Jochen Schiewe

Jochen Schiewe is a full professor for Geoinformatics and Geovisualization at HafenCity University Hamburg, Germany, where he chairs the Lab for Geoinformatics and Geovisualization (g2lab). He received his PhD degree from University of Hannover, Germany, and his habilitation (venia legendi) from University of Vechta, Germany. His research interests are in the fields of cartographic algorithms, uncertainty modeling and visualization, and media maps. Since 2019, he is president of the German Cartographic Society (DGfK).