Foreword by the ICA Commision Chairmen
(Published in a Proceedings of the Seminar on ELECTRONIC ATLASES)
The stimulating tradition of having a joint ICA commission meeting was first initiated in Hungary in 1983, and the ICA Commissions on Education and Training; on Map and Spatial Data Use; and on National and Regional Atlases therefore gladly convened there once again. However, on this occasion, the former pattern of separate meetings was changed to an integrated, combined program. The Visegrád conference centre of Eötvös Loránd University again proved to be the perfect setting for such a meeting: too far from the big city distractions and near enough to the metropolis to profit from its technical infrastructure, and indeed, from the stimulating attention of cartographic executives György Domokos (chairman of the Hungarian Cartographic Society), Árpád Papp-Váry (Hungary's representative in the ICA vice-presidency) and, all the way from Canada, the ICA president Fraser Taylor.
Many thanks are due to Prof. István Klinghammer and his staff (Mrs. Ajtay, Messrs. Török and Zentai), who were responsible for the local organization and saw to all the matters regarding accommodations, travel reservations, and to the technical matters like the state-of-the-art electronic equipment. Dr. László Zentai transformed the lecture room of the Forestry Institute at Visegrád into a high-tech centre. Many Western European teaching institutes would have liked to have had the array and functionality of equipment, facilities, and technical support. Thanks to his efforts and that of his staff, all the advanced multimedia programs and electronic atlas participants had carried, were demonstrated to their full potential.
Apart from providing the excellent, comfortable, and inexpensive accommodations as well as a conducive seminar environment, István and his colleagues were busy in other self-im posed tasks including: ferrying stray seminar participants from Budapest airport at odd hours from faraway countries like Thailand, Canada, China, the US and Japan; providing impromptu sightseeing tours; and organizing formal excursions to the Cathedral and the Museum of Religious Art in nearby Esztergom.
Conditions were set for a successful event, only to be enhanced by the participants themselves. They presented 22 papers of high standard on the production and use of electronic atlases and on teaching both of these cartographic processes. Indeed the most important aspects of the seminar were the software demonstrations and the extensive discussions between representatives of the three commissions, made possible by the ample timeframe and the informal contacts during the meals and in the evenings. We hope to repeat this pleasant experience somewhere soon.
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