The Terms of Reference of the Commission for the 2019-2023 working period are:
- Promote research and development on the field of cartographic heritage, more specifically on:
- objects: old maps, charts, globes, relief models, bird’s eye views, etc.
- digitisation: 2d, 3d; hardware, software, issues, solutions
- georeferencing: georeferencing methods, tools, recognising map projections
- archiving: how to store; metadata
- extracting content: possibility of automatic content extraction (vectorisation)
- providing cartographic heritage on-line
- analysing old maps in the terms of geometry (accuracy analysis, projection recognition), map symbols (how symbols depend on age, place, author etc.) and content (spatial/spatio-temporal analysis of map content)
- Partnership with MAGIC (Map and Geoinformation Curators Group).
- Promote intra- and interdisciplinary co-operation:
- annual conferences on Cartographic Heritage
- thematic workshops, joint projects and workshops with other commissions, societies
- connecting existing on-line collections, creating meta-search pages
- interdisciplinary research – cartography and various fields of geo- and biosciences (e.g. landuse / landscape / habitat change analysis based on old maps) and especially digital humanities (history, archaeology, linguistics, literature)
- Popularisation – tools, websites, campaigns to popularise cartographic heritage.
- Tutorials – examples of good practice of all above.
- Documentation of commission work
- abstract database of all cartoheritage conference/journal papers
