Cartography 2007: Reflection, Status, And Prediction (Preface‪)‬

In recent years, cartography has arguably been experiencing a renaissance, as evidenced by the diversity of cartographic products accessible to and, in fact, accessed by the public. The decade-long vision of a Digital Earth is coming to fruition. Google Earth in particular has captured the public's imagination, both as a highly interactive online mapping tool and as a de facto standard for conveying geographic context in TV news programs. Meanwhile, alternative cartographic expressions are gaining ground. For example, the May 2007 issue of the magazine Vanity Fair includes a series of area cartograms illustrating global environmental disparities. Within the academic realm, visualization and particularly exploration have firmly established themselves as dominant cartographic paradigms. Progress is also being made in connecting cartography with other disciplines (such as psychology or computer science) through shared participation in conferences, funded research projects, and publications. Commercial out-of-the-box GIS software appears to finally be catching up with the aspirations of cartographic design, making it easier to create beautiful maps that are nevertheless driven by large databases. Meanwhile, open-source software and distributed computing infrastructures--including so-called mash-ups--are challenging traditional notions of cartographic production. This then was the context within which we issued--in March 2006--a call for submissions to the 2007 U.S. National Report to the International Cartographic Association. In accordance with the Report's theme of "Cartography 2007: Reflections, Status, and Prediction," we were particularly interested in contributions that would address our discipline in terms of: