Cartography and maps support the continuous rising of the awareness of the power of spatial data, which further lays a foundation for the popularity of various location based services and applications in society. Cartography and Geographic Information System education has been a core activity in the cartographic academic community for knowledge creation and transfer in higher education institutions. Maps in primary and high schools play a unique role across disciplines to build the spatial thinking capacities of young generations. Over years educators train students via lectures and lab works into which digital technologies are gradually incorporated. The COVID-19 pandemic has been fast forwarding our pace to employ digital technologies in online teaching and learning. Teachers are passively or proactively adapted to conduct their teaching online and redesign their lectures and assessments of students’ performance. On another side, students are getting used to online learning even more quickly with various digital devices in an interactive and collective way. It creates opportunities for cartographic GIS educators to build a body of knowledge for cartography which can be used to build open source educational resources systematically. Further flexible curriculum can be designed and implemented for professional and continuous education and training at various levels. Future education of cartography and GIS can improve map literacy and make a sustainable education.

Maps have long been a part of everyday life for the general public, and even more so in today’s knowledge society. No doubt, cartography as a profession of map design is assuming a more important role in the formation of intellectual skills in terms of spatial reasoning. Since its emergence as an academic discipline about 100 years ago, cartography has undergone many paradigm shifts. Its interaction with other disciplines has also constantly unfolded. These changes have left traces in cartographic education programs. In the age of big data, however, we are facing four fundamental challenges: (1) cartographic courses are being marginalized or even disappearing from degree programs in geospatial sciences; (2) the role of cartographers is increasingly eclipsed as a side effect of participatory cartography; (3) cartographers are blamed whenever something goes wrong with map use; and (4) professional map publishers can hardly compete with online mapping platforms dominated by Internet giants. Based on a contextual analysis of this seemingly gloomy situation, the paper reveals a number of proliferation points for the design of future cartographic curricula. First, cartography, once dedicated to supporting geospatial sciences, is thriving in the soil of data science, mapping not only the earth or other celestial bodies, but literally any kind of virtual space. Second, cartography has benefited from theoretical and technological advances in cognitive sciences, especially non-intrusive user studies, so that spatial cognition is becoming an integral component of cartographic education. Third, the role of scapegoat for wrongdoing of maps has accentuated cartographer’s overarching responsibility for quality and ethical issues in the geodata value chain. Finally, the diversification of the labor market requires new approaches to prepare future talents for a coopetition-oriented ecosystem in the marketplace.

The third view of space states that space is neither lifeless nor neutral, but a living structure capable of being more living or less living. The living structure is defined as a physical and mathematical structure or simply characterized by the recurring notion (or the inherent hierarchy) of far more small substructures than large ones. The more substructures the more living, and the higher hierarchy of the substructures the more living. This paper seeks to lay out a new kind of GeoInformatics on the notion of living structure and on the third view of space. The new GeoInformatics aims not only to better understand the forms and processes of everyday space but also-maybe more importantly-to make the space or the Earth’s surface living or more living. We introduce two fundamental laws of living structure: Tobler’s law on spatial dependence or homogeneity and scaling law on spatial interdependence or heterogeneity. We further argue that these two laws favor statistics over exactitude, because the statistics tend to make a structure more living than the exactitude. We present the concept of living structure through some working examples and make it clear how a living structure differs from a non-living or less-living structure. In order to make a structure or space living or more living, we introduce two design principles-differentiation and adaptation-using two paintings and two city plans as working examples. The new GeoInformatics is a science of living structure, dealing with a wide range of scales of the everyday space, from the smallest scale of ornaments on walls to the scale of the entire Earth’s surface.

If geodetic coordinates from an ellipsoid are included in the equations of a projection for mapping a sphere instead of geographical coordinates, the result will be a projection of the ellipsoid into a plane. This will slightly change the distortion distribution of the initial map projection. The question is to what extent the replacement of geographical with geodetic coordinates will affect this change. In this paper, we deal with conformal, equal-area and equidistant projections of the sphere, which we modify by using geodetic coordinates instead of geographical ones. The result will be an approximately conformal, approximately equal-area and approximately equidistant projection. It is shown that in this case the maximum distortion of the angles in approximately conformal projections will be approximately 23.09', the maximum distortion of the area in approximately equal-area projections less than 0.7% and the maximum distortion of lengths in approximately equidistant projections less than 0.7%, therefore on the maps imperceptible.

Educating the future generation of modern cartographers, being able to deal with the rapid changes of modern technologies and developing the skills and competences to not only being able to cope with those challenges but also to be able to contribute to develop the domain further, has become a rising concern of many. In this paper, the experiences of setting up an International MSc program are shared as well as some reasoning for the development of an underpinning curriculum are given.

Geomatics is an interdisciplinary subject. Many disciplines have teaching demands in this field. A new course on “Geomatics Technology” has been suggested by the Weiyang College of Tsinghua University of China for the major of “Mathematical and Scientific Basic Science+Civil, Hydraulic and Marine Engineering”. This paper offers a data-led geomatics teaching mode, developing a customized teaching cloud platform, to explore the cross-integrated innovative teaching methods. Teachers and students can assign and submit assignments on this platform. The platform constitutes a data flow with the data download, data processing and result sharing. It encourages communication among students in various majors, grades and units using data as the medium, from data processing to application upstream and downstream. In the “Geomatics Technology” course, geospatial data has emerged as a vital element of the multidisciplinary approach. This kind of teaching mode has been used in the postgraduate remote sensing course offered by Tsinghua University’s Department of Civil Engineering and Construction Management. Furthermore, the mode will be used for the first time in the autumn semester of 2022 in the undergraduate teaching of Weiyang College and civil engineering, to offer a novel idea for the reform of courses linked to geospatial informatics.

In the current era of digital surveying and mapping to intelligent surveying and mapping, ubiquitous surveying and mapping has brought many opportunities and challenges to college engineering course teaching. With the development of ubiquitous surveying and mapping, college engineering practice courses urgently need to respond to ubiquitous surveying and mapping. The research aims to integrate the development of ubiquitous surveying and mapping into the teaching of engineering practice courses in colleges, including promoting Android, Brower/Server (B/S), and Client/Server (C/S) to build a platform for practice courses. This also incorporates real development cases in measurement data processing such as gravity field refinement. In this way, the teaching level of engineering practice courses in colleges can be improved, and new ideas can be put forward for cultivating surveying and mapping talents in the new era in colleges. Finally, it can also provide new ideas for the organization of surveying and mapping practice courses under the background of the pandemic.

New requirements have been proposed for GIS practice teaching in colleges and universities in response to the developmental changes of national and industrial sectors during the social transition. Meanwhile, the underlying core characteristics of GIS should remain unchanged in GIS teaching to ensure they serve as the inherent attributes distinguishing GIS from other disciplines. Therefore, the clarification of the dialectical relationship between “changing” and “unchanging” in GIS practice teaching becomes the primary issue to address in relevant teaching reform. To address this issue, the present study systematically analyzes the structural contradictions in GIS practice teaching in the social transition period, and then closely examines the dialectical relationship between “changing” and “unchanging” from the key aspects of educational philosophy, teaching content, teaching methodology, and teaching assessment. Next, using the course of “GIS Practice Design” at the Central South University as an example, the present study describes this university’s reform and inheritance in GIS practice teaching, aiming to provide reference for GIS practice teaching in other universities or majors.

SpacetimeAI and GeoAI are currently hot topics, applying the latest algorithms in computer science, such as deep learning, to spatiotemporal data. Although deep learning algorithms have been successfully applied to raster data due to their natural applicability to image processing, their applications in other spatial and space-time data types are still immature. This paper sets up the proposition of using a network (&graph)-based framework as a generic spatial structure to present space-time processes that are usually represented by the points, polylines, and polygons. We illustrate network and graph-based SpaceTimeAI, from graph-based deep learning for prediction, to space-time clustering and optimisation. These applications demonstrate the advantages of network (graph)-based SpacetimeAI in the fields of transport&mobility, crime&policing, and public health.

Augmented Reality Geographic Information System (ARGIS) applications can only provide users accurate content services with a highly precise geo-registration. However, the absolute 6DOF (Degree of Freedom) pose provided by the portable sensors is usually inaccurate in urban outdoors, resulting in poorly geo-registration accuracy for ARGIS applications. Aiming at this issue, an automatic vision-aided localization method based on the 2D map is proposed to improve the initial localization accuracy of the portable sensors, and an overall geo-registration optimization framework for outdoor ARGIS is proposed. Based on the initial pose provided by the sensors, the basic principles of the vision-aided localization method are expounded in detail. The experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively correct the initial pose obtained by the pose sensors, and improve the geo-registration accuracy of outdoor ARGIS applications ultimately.