Cartographia, mathematica et informatica
Like the teachings of ICT (Information & Communication Technology), Cartography or map-making is concerned with the recording and transmission of information. Cartographers, however, limit themselves to the domain of spatial data, i.e. data that is somehow bound to the Earth's surface. A geographer describes this data; a cartographer visualizes it. The late Dutch professor Cornelis Koeman (1918-2006) summed it up succinctly in his inaugural address at the (State) University Utrecht in 1968 by stating that a cartographer must first ask himself: “How do I say what to whom”. He/she is bound by the rules of graphic image language, as formulated by Jacques Bertin in his standard work Sémiologie Graphique (1967). Koeman's successor Prof. Dr. Ferjan Ormeling (1942-2025) formulated this in the Kartografisch Tijdschrift (1982-4) as follows: “Cartography is the science of transmitting information by means of maps, in which the information ...