201 Carthema (www.carthema.ch) is an application for thematic mapping, born in Lausanne University at the Geography Institute. Initially developped for old MacOS platform in Pascal language, JCarThema will be the Java version of CarThema. The main advantage of this migration will be platform independency. Carthema offers a wide range of thematic mapping representations. JCarthema will inheritate these functionnalities and by adopting the terms of opensource licensing, provide an application dedicated to thematic mapping to the FOSS4G community. The project is at its start, and one main question appears : with the usual idea in mind "not reinventing the wheel", what toolkit/framework is appropriate ? Should we start from scratch, use Geotools, create a plugin for uDig, OpenJUMP or gvSIG ? Therefore, this presentation will not give you answers, but rather ask the good questions. FOSS4G2006 - Free And Open Source Software for Geoinformatics Session 7 : Desktop application Olivier ERTZ olivier.ertz@heig-vd.ch Andreas Meissner andreas.meissner@microgis.ch Andreas Meissner andreas.meissner@microgis.ch <MaKaC.conference.ContributionType object at 0xb49ab4ec>