Proceedings of ICA National Atlases Commission Meeting, 1990, Beijing

Summary

This paper presents the preface and selected paper abstracts from the proceedings of the 1990 Beijing meeting of the ICA National Atlases Commission. The meeting brought together commission members and foreign colleagues from Sweden, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, Spain, India, the Soviet Union, Czech and Slovakia, along with over 40 Chinese counterparts. A total of 35 papers were collected, 26 of which were presented, focusing primarily on national reports on national atlases, electronic atlases, and national atlas information systems. The proceedings were edited by Dr. Timothy Trainor of the U.S. Bureau of Census, with editorial assistance from Senior Engineer Jin Yinchun and Research Assistant Chen Xiaogang, and partial review by Associate Professor Yan Chongchao. At the opening ceremony, addresses were delivered by Professor Sun Honglie, Vice-President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Professor Huang Bingwei, President of the Geographical Society of China, and Professor Chen Shupeng, among others, emphasizing the Chinese government's commitment to national atlas compilation and reviewing China's cartographic heritage from ancient silk maps, bronze maps, and stone-carved maps to modern national atlases. The papers cover diverse topics: a preliminary design for a China National Atlas Information System (objectives, hardware/software environment, database construction, and cartographic expert system); compilation experiences of the Yellow River Basin Atlas (systematic topic selection, unified base map system, reliable data, symbol design, coordination, and printing); features of the Hunan Provincial Economic Atlas (resource-environment-economy focus, novel and reliable data, theoretical guidance, and public accessibility); organization and compilation of the Hebei Provincial Series Atlases (sound editorial organization, scientific and practical content, new technology adoption, and data quality control); compilation principles and structure of the Henan Agricultural Resources and Agricultural Zoning Atlas; design concepts for environmental prediction and countermeasure atlases; compilation principles and integrated cartographic theory application in irrigation atlases; and the Selected Collection of Ancient Chinese Maps, which divides China's map history into four stages (primitive maps, yudi maps, grid-based maps, and longitude-latitude surveyed maps) and introduces treasured ancient maps.