(I apoligize for the lack of postings. A lack of access to a reliable Internet connection will do that.)

Before getting on to Day 2, a recap of the final events of Day 1 is in order. The day finished off with a dinner in the comfortable confines of the Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec. Rex Murphy, familiar to many Canadians for hosting a weekly phone-in show on CBC Radio, entertained the crowd with an hour long speech only loosely related to the geospatial industry. What would he know anyway, about what we do? He even admitted so himself. He delivered his theme of people in Canada have a strong sense of place which generally devolved into a talk on how wonderful it is to be Canadian and, in his case, a Newfoundlander. His message was delivered with many asides and turnings along the way. Never concise but mostly entertaining.

As for the rest of the festivities that followed, I cannot recount as we departed early to catch what remained of the hockey game (that ended disappointingly).

On to Day 2 . . .

There were a couple of interesting sessions on mountain cartography, including a couple of presentations by Tom Patterson of the U. S. National Park Service (see more of his work at his site) and Martin Gamache of the Alpine Mapping Guild. Aileen Buckley of ESRI presented some investigations of annotating physiographic features (more available on the ESRI site - apparently they've produced a white paper on the topic which I will find later), something that is really only of interest to cartographers.

The afternoon discussion panel on the future of topographic maps in Canada was certainly interesting and well attended. Representatives of NRCan were there to explain their plans for paper topographic maps and answer the many questions and heated comments from audience members. Essentially nothing has changed. Paper maps will still be discontinued. Raster files of the sheets will be made available to distributors - although none have appeared yet. Eventually all the topographic data will be replaced by a set of vector data layers collectively to be called CanVec - but don't hold your breath as this won't occur for another 3 years. There will be one set of data, ideally suited for 1:50,000 from which other generalized datasets will be driven.

More reports to come.