Thematic cartography: A key course in geospatial engineering

Abstract

In this paper a new revised undergraduate course on Thematic Cartography (TC) is presented as a 5 ECTS compulsory core course of the 300 ECTS undergraduate curriculum of a relevant European University engineering School leading to a five years engineering degree, comparable to the MEng degree, after the submission of the diploma dissertation. The paper presents the underlying philosophy for the course design, respecting fundamental criteria of university education and considering the fact that this TC compulsory course is the basis of a series of other nine cartography plus GIS related elective courses available in the curriculum, oriented in various engineering disciplines (geodesy and surveying, cadastre and photogrammetry, infrastructure engineering, including road construction, transportation, hydraulic works, environmental engineering). This course is focused not only on the theoretical issues of TC but also on implementation in terms of a web-based course, targeting at the familiarisation of the students with a series of relevant free software applications in relation with the mining of relevant data from the EUROSTAT free provider, in order to develop modularly a TC project. It is shown how this key course covers the educational and student needs of a spectrum of other courses that follow in the engineering curriculum and raises an overall interest of engineering students for cartographic science and technologies.