October 2004

ACSM-CaGIS 32nd Annual Map Design Competition

Dear UCGIS members:

Announcing the ACSM-CaGIS 32nd Annual Map Design Competition --

* Students - think about entering your class projects!
* Teachers - please encourage your students to participate.
* Professionals - earn recognition from your peers!

For more information, visit http://www.acsm.net/cagis/mapcomp.html or read on!

Good luck in the competitions!

The ACSM-CaGIS 32nd Annual Map Design Competition
The Cartography and Geographic Information Society of the American Congress on Surveying and Mapping are pleased to announce this year's map design competition.

The purpose of the competition is to promote interest in map design and to recognize significant design advances in cartography. The competition is open to all map-makers in the United States and Canada. Noted cartographers judge the entries based on the following criteria: color, overall design and impression, craftsmanship, and typography. Entries will be displayed at a number of national and international professional functions and will then become part of the permanent collection of the U.S. Library of Congress. Note that the focus of this competition is map design; therefore, judging will be based on cartographic design criteria, such as creativity, text (spelling and grammar, too), balance, unity, clarity, use of color, and subject matter.

Students are particularly encouraged to apply for the National Geographic Society-sponsored awards. The competition is open to all college-level student mapmakers who have completed and/or published the submitted map during 2004. Each student award consists of a cash prize ($200), a National Geographic atlas, and a certificate of award. Runner-ups will receive a beautiful National Geographic map or atlas.

The deadline for this year's competition is January 15, 2005. Maps completed during 2004 are eligible. Each award is described below.

Professional Category
* Best of Show
* Best of Category
* Reference: A map whose objective is to show the location of a variety of different features. The focus of a reference map is on accurate depiction at a given scale of the location of individual environmental features.
* Thematic: A map whose objective is to illustrate a theme or the relationship among several themes. The focus of a thematic map is on the structure of the distribution rather than on location.
* Book/Atlas: Atlases and books use original maps as the primary (in the case of an atlas) or a significant (in the case of a book) communication device.
* Recreation/Travel: A map designed to assist readers in pursuit of recreation or travel, such as road maps, trail maps, and maps of parks or natural areas.
* Interactive Digital: A map that is designed for digital media (Internet, CD, DVD). Maps in this category include some level of interactivity, such as selection and transformation, or animation.
* Other: This category is for submissions that do not fit into any other category. Judges reserve the right to assign entries to another category if they feel it is appropriate and will offer an award only for an exceptional map that does correspond with the other categories.

Student Category
* National Geographic Society Award for Best Student Map Design
* Printed: A map or map series designed specifically for print media.
* Electronic: A map or series of related maps designed specifically for electronic media (i.e., CD, DVD, the Web, etc.)

Enter the Competition
Submit three copies of entries in the Professional category and two in the Student category. The fees are $10 per student map and $20 per professional map. The entry form is available at (insert the web address for the document here).

Please send entries to:
ACSM Map Competition
6 Montgomery Village Avenue
Suite 403
Gaithersburg, MD 20879

For further information, see www.acsm.net or call (240) 632-9716 ext.109.

Last Year's Winners
* See excerpts from last year's award winners at http://www.acsm.net/cagis/03mapwinners.html.
* Additional information about the National Geographic Award can be found at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/maps/caward/index.html#cong

Digital Atlas of Maryland Agriculture
Best in Show and Winner of the NGS Student Award in the Electronic entry category
University of Maryland Baltimore County, Department of Geography & Environmental
Systems

LAEP Colloquium for Wed., Oct. 6

Speaker:
Alexandre Repetti, Visiting Scholar in the Geographic Information Science Center

Title: System for Monitoring Urban Functionalities (SMURF): An Application of Participatory GIS

Time and place:
Wednesday, October 6
1 to 2 pm
315A Wurster Hall

Summary:
The System for Monitoring Urban Functionalities (SMURF) is a GIS software application designed for participatory contexts. In a strategic land-use or urban management approach, SMURF offers a database platform for collecting and sharing spatial and non-spatial information on land-use and projects, for monitoring and controlling the local development and for comparison with other communities.
The talk will start with a brief introduction of the context and limits of GIS applications for land-use and urban planning and management, It will then present the SMURF instrument and its data management components, as well as the participatory data collection approach. It will introduce an application case, the city of Thies, Senegal, where SMURF supports the local management for four years. It will end with prospects for adapting the instruments to the Internet
and conclusion.

Biography:
Alexandre Repetti (1973) is a postdoc visiting scholar in the Geographic Information Science Center (UC Berkeley). He finished his PhD last January in the Environmental Science and Technology Institute of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. He is an environmental engineer specialist on urban and regional planning, involving collaborative GIS and decision support
systems. He gives lectures on land-use and urban management for developing countries and is a fellow of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research Partnerships for Mitigating Syndromes of Global Change. Working on the theme of improving urban governance, Thies, Senegal, has been a relevant field for testing his theoretical propositions and for his PhD that received the 2004 Lausanne Research and Innovation Award.