| Abstract: | AbstractAt the end of the 1980s, the computer experts who had been in the vanguard of cartographic development lost their position due to the fact that computers became democratised. This may be ascribed to the 'Macintosh' effect. This in turn led cartographic companies back to the core of their professional know-how: it is cartographers themselves who now develop the scope of their profession, utilising all the resources provided by the new computer technology. But, if cartographers want to keep playing a major role in the geographic information arena, they have to determine and develop the specific elements of their discipline: if technology mobilizes all forces to the detriment of theory, then the discipline progressively weakens and ends in being swallowed by another discipline.It is the cartographers' task to transform the spatial information from its verbal, social and numerical form into visual form for visual thinking; this visualisation provides for cognitive functions, communication functions, decision support functions and social functions. In order for maps to perform these functions cartographers should continue, now with digital tools, to safeguard data quality by monitoring the compilation stage during which they have to see to it that the heterogeneous datasets in databases will be made comparable, both from a geometrical, semantical, updatedness and completeness point of view. This main aspect of the cartographer's job can be called its engineering part. The other main aspect will remain the map design part, that leads to proper communication of the spatial information. Both aspects will remain the cartographer's domain if he/she succeeds in providing a theoretical basis for his/her work. |
