The age of the virtual worlds has begun. In the last years we have witnessed an incredible development of this new technology, which is now commonly used by all the people that will visualise any three-dimensional data. For centuries the main application field of cartography was the two-dimensional visualisation of spatial data. Can cartography also profit from this new technology? A three-dime...

The past 25 years have seen great progress in parcellating the cerebral cortex into a mosaic of many distinct areas in mice, monkeys, and humans. Quantitative studies of interareal connectivity have revealed unexpectedly many pathways and a wide range of connection strengths in mouse and macaque cortex. In humans, advances in analyzing "structural" and "functional" connectivity using powerful b...

Glossary attribute table: a table with one row allocated to each feature and one column allocated to each defining characteristic buffer: dilation of point, line, or area features by a defined distance datum: a mathematical reference model for global coordinates geodesy: the science of precise Earth measurement geoportal: a single point of entry to a distributed collection of data sets hybrid m...

Cerebral cartography and connectomics pursue similar goals in attempting to create maps that can inform our understanding of the structural and functional organization of the cortex. Connectome maps explicitly aim at representing the brain as a complex network, a collection of nodes and their interconnecting edges. This article reflects on some of the challenges that currently arise in the inte...