Advances in Cartography and GIScience. Volume 1

Tag cloud visualisation has been introduced in the seventies. In current Web 2.0 applications this method is a very popular visualisation technique. This paper presents an approach that uses this technique in combination with maps. Our method augments cartographic representations with additional verbal content, which is one of the strongest instruments available to cartographers to communicate spatial information. The idea is that only few words extracted from the semantics contained in the features of the underlying map are suitable to characterise the map section as a whole. To demonstrate the approach we used the OpenStreetMap dataset. In order to allow a variety of web map clients to use the results of the method, we realised the prototype by implementing it as a Web Map Service (WMS) based on the according Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specification.

Our sonic environment is the matter of subject in multiple domains which developed individual means of its description. As a result, it lacks an established visual language through which knowledge can be connected and insights shared. We provide a visual communication framework for the systematic and coherent documentation of sound in large-scale environments. This consists of visual encodings and mappings of acoustic parameters into distinct graphic variables that present plausible solutions for the visualization of sound. These candidate encodings are assembled into an application-independent, multifunctional, and extensible design guide. We apply the guidelines and show example maps that acts as a basis for the exploration of audio cartography.

This paper is based on the assumption that the contents of all maps are emanating from three different sources: 1/ visual observations 2/ abstract thinking and 3/ human imagination. Each individual map has a specific combination of these basic elements. This combination is visualised with help of a triangle diagram. Based on the proportions between these three components we can classify all maps and analyse them in different ways. In this paper the analyses go in two different directions:

The contribution is a tribute to Czech Univ. Prof. Karel Kuchar and reminds us of the 35th anniversary, counted from his last public lecture named Aesthetics of Map Production. Unfortunately, Prof. Kuchar was not able to elaborate the issue of aesthetic aspects of cartographic production in further detail. The aim of this contribution is to categorize and summarize this knowledge. The first part mentions the traditional, and we can also say never-ending, discussion on cartography and early maps being a form of art. It is followed by a summary of aesthetic aspects of (not only) early maps (map format, sheet composition, use of space, shapes of map fields and structure of outlines, form of compositional elements, map contents, cartographic language, thematic cartography methods, use of colour and font in maps, author’s style and handwriting). Finally, several pieces of evidence are offered confirming that “early maps” and “computer map production” are not incompatible.

Users have a wide choice of artefacts for use in gaining a greater understanding of geography. They are generously provisioned with maps, diagrams, imagery and visualizations that can be output on paper, viewed on screen or manipulated as an interactive product. Generally, in the past these products were generated by a designer/producer prior to actual use. However, relatively recently, ‘self-generating’ maps have become possible via Web 2.0. These have little or no cartographer input and they are generated from data captured and provided by sensors, cellular telephone data and satellite imagery. They provide immediate geographical visualisations to ‘wired’ map consumers.

Almost from the beginning of the cinematography cartographic products were used in movies namely as props, for documentation purposes or as visual shortcuts. Maps play a significant role particularly in “adventure” type of movies, where reality is meeting with fantasy and science with art. There are different approaches how moviemakers handle portraying maps rendered from literature. The portrayal of maps in movies varies from simple look on reproduction of a map to attempts to imprint the feeling of the changing landscape by strictly movie making tools. The more fantasy there is in the story, the more colourful the map presentation can be. As the main goal of moviemakers is to tell the story, the portrayal of the map depends on its significance to the storytelling. The map's portrayal is also dependent on the chosen style of the movie. This paper explores how different approaches of map portrayal in the movie resonate with the story and style of the movie and how different types of map portrayal in movies correspond with map use. There are also discussed possible outside influences on map portrayal. These different approaches are demonstrated on map portrayal in various movie adaptations of H.R. Haggard's novel King Solomon's Mines.

To what extent do state topographic maps mirror society? If maps are to be read as ‘texts’, by their symbolization of the national landscape, topographic maps should provide a rich and detailed reflection that offers interpretation on many levels. This paper describes an investigation to explore whether national conditions are intrinsically expressed in official 1:50 000 topographic map symbology. A series of bivariate tests of association are conducted between the symbologies of 20 European state topographic maps and a variety of national statistics. Several significant correlations are found, although these tend to indicate general associations rather than explicit links. The findings nevertheless suggest state topographic map symbologies broadly reflect the influence of specifically national circumstances, which ultimately have a decisive impact on their design.

There has been only limited comparison of the different contexts in which maps have been brought together, and hardly any critical consideration of the contours of map collection. This paper aims to begin to correct some of these gaps by starting to chart the changing contemporary significance of map collecting, to explore its variations and to explain differences in individual map collecting practices. It is grounded in social theoretical approaches to the wider world of collecting and in the literature around post- Harleian critical cartography. The unique characteristics of map collecting are explored, and a detailed comparison of map collecting practices of British antiquarian and everyday map collectors is presented, following an investigation of textual sources and an ethnography of collecting practices and spaces. Differences between the collecting fields of elite antiquarian practices, as against more prosaic everyday collecting suggest that we need to understand map collecting practices as ‘placed behaviour’, in which economic relations are mediated by local culture and places.

In commercial mapping and atlas cartography cost-effective production of maps and atlases is a constant issue in the business concept of commercial cartographic enterprises. A combined GIS and visualisation system can be considered the production environment of choice for quality, cost-effective map production. To strengthen the visualisation component of such system, one concept of particular relevance is that of the atlas toolbox. Using the modular principle this framework allows for the production of maps and atlases by combination of technical or cartographic components and methods. This paper discusses the concept and application of one particular component, the map component, for automated, rule-based quality map construction

Since the roles of intuition and affection in map use and the relationship between these processes and the effectiveness in activities supported by maps have not been completely measured, this paper intends to bring a contribution to the discussion about the relationship between subjective preference and objective performance. A series of experiments with graduation students was carried out, asking students what they would prefer as a desirable type of map to use for an analytical decision-making process and then their performance of this process was measured. To ensure the validity of the experiment, maps used for this study were designed using a social background as their theme, with analysts being asked to decide where to invest public funds. The same experiment was conducted first using a subset of paper maps (1st stage) and then using interactive web maps (2nd stage). Three types of subsets of thematic maps were assigned randomly among the respondents. Statistical tests were applied and the correlation between preference and performance in this experiment was measured. Results for the 1st step show that there is no significant variation due to the technique used in the performance tests, and for this specific subject, there is insufficient evidence to guarantee that user's preference among map techniques can lead or is related to better performance. Also it was noted that performance decreases for a reasoning related task, and maybe this could be related to the need for a deeper analysis of data evolution through time.

In this paper, we introduce a method for identifying the specific needs of a community from a user survey, and adapting maps accordingly. This method was applied to four different groups of trekkers: walkers, road cyclists, cross-country bikers, and recreational trekkers. Relevant concepts, criticisms and expectations for each group were identified using natural language processing and lexicometry methods and tools. Suggestions for adapting maps focus on data selection and graphic representation. Pedestrian trails were emphasized using trail-marking signs as graphical symbols and adding numbers which refer to additional information. Specific trails were added to the cross-country biking map using the difficulty level indication of ski maps. Moreover, contour lines were highlighted for crosscountry bikers to help them to understand relief. The road cyclist map was designed at a 1/50 000 scale with generalized data. The slope of cycling paths was indicated by a diverging color scheme to convey the difficulty of different sections of road. This paper describes part of an on-demand map making process and illustrates it for a specific community, trekkers. It has been shown that it is possible to select data and define radical graphic choices as long as the community is targeted enough to have the same needs and wishes.

Despite their popularity electronic maps on mobile devices have not eliminated the use of paper maps. Conventional paper maps can offer a quick overview due to their large format while the map content on mobile devices is adjusted to the limited display size. However the electronic map applications provide many additional functions that paper cannot offer. The authors provide arguments for the linking of the two worlds through explaining how the advantages of both media complement each other. Hence, an approach to bridge the technological gap between analogue paper and the electronic domain is presented. A technology developed by Swedish company Anoto is used to enhance regular paper with an unobtrusive dot pattern enabling an electronic pen with a camera to determine its position on the paper. The potential benefits of this technology are discussed on the basis of two application scenarios that can demonstrate the feasibility of the linking of digital and analogue media and its benefits for the map user.

The Web has facilitated wider access to spatial information and allowed non-experts to view, use, access and build maps using Web GIS technology. There is a significant number of Web GIS applications which are open to the wider public including people without any GIS knowledge. The complexity of Web GIS interfaces, the risk and uncertainty they incorporate and the limited knowledge of non-experts in spatial data handling and GIS operations influence the perceived trustworthiness of these systems. Previous scholars, such as Monmonier (1996) recognised the importance of trust in map design, however there has been no research into how trust can be improved for Web GIS applications. Three studies were conducted in order to investigate what elements influence non-experts’ trust perceptions and how specific Web GIS trustee attributes should be designed in order to improve trust. The results not only demonstrate the importance of further trust research in the Web GIS context, but also show that trust can be improved through interface design, which is an ethical need in order to support non-experts’ trust assessments.

The paper presents the usability evaluation of a map-based multipublishing service for outdoor leisure activities. The multi-publishing service allows users to access the same spatial information contents through different channels, such as printed maps, map applications for the web or mobile phones and other interactive media. These channels together form an interface for the geospatial information. The users may use the channel or the combination of channels that is best suited for the current situation. The user experience is constituted across the channels, thus the channels need to be networked and the seamless interaction between the channels needs to be ensured.

The case study presented here illustrates how the usability evaluation methods of thinking aloud and questionnaires are exploited to achieve results for concrete input for the iterative design process of a map service. Examples of resulted suggestions to improve the service include: determining how to further develop the user interfaces of the respective channels or determining in what way the map design should be improved to better serve the user needs. The evaluation was conducted for the channels of a web map application, a mobile map application on an iPhone and printed maps.

A research project is investigating if access to an existing, georeferenced park management data archive can be enhanced through the concept of a geo-knowledge tool (GKT). The tool is built using the collaborative and participatory notions of Web 2.0, and associated, potentially useful, user contributed information. Can the existing traditional data be amalgamated with non-traditional data sources - available on the Web or generated through participatory Web 2.0 tools - to produce an effective tool for data access and enhance the existing archive?

We present a methodology for using cartographic-based processes to alert the vision-impaired as they navigate through areas with transitory hazards. The focus of this methodology is the use of gazetteer-based georeferencing to integrate existing local cartographic resources with user-contributed geospatial data. User-contributed geospatial data is of high interest because it leverages local geographic expertise and offers significant advantages in dealing with hazard information in real-time. For blind and visionimpaired people, information about transitory hazards encountered while navigating through a public environment can be contributed by end-users in the same public environment, and quickly integrated into existing cartographic resources. For this project, we build collections of user-contributed geospatial updates from email, voice communication, text messages, and social networks.

This paper presents our QGIS-MT, an extension of Quantum GIS (QGIS) for interactive tabletops. First proposed is an interactive and collaborative environment that allows several users to interact simultaneously on a multi- touch surface. This environment aims at favoring communication among users and at enhancing social awareness and the decision-making process. Next presented are the results of an interview with GIS users, which gives support to the proposed approach. In addition, presented here is a novel interaction technique, called Finger-Count Shortcuts that lets you navigate and activate numerous commands quickly and easily by performing simple finger gestures. Finally, there is a detailed discussion of how Quantum GIS was integrated into this environment and how our QGIS-MT plug-in providing multi-touch capabilities and Finger-Count Shortcuts were implemented in standard GIS menus.

Nowadays, the amount of geographic data is permanently increasing. One key issue to take advantage of these data is to be able to evaluate their fitness for use and their complexity. We describe in this paper a system enabling a user to discover the content of geographic databases based on a formalization of their specifications, i.e. enabling the user to discover which entities of interest are represented in a given database, and how they are represented. The system uses a global ‘domain’ ontology describing the topographic real world entities, which can be queried by the user to express his/her needs. Some local (or application) ontologies are used to formalize the content of database specifications. They are annotated with concepts from the global ontology. The described system is implemented as a web application and includes a web mapping solution for the visualization of data samples.

In this article is discussed possibility of development of place name (toponyms) ontologies as knowledge background for building semantic web. Place name is complex object. Place name conceptual domain ontology approach is discussed as possibility to develop platform for Semantic Web and better Internet interactions. Elements of global ontology and domain oriented ontologies are discussed on the examples of UNGEGN World Geographical Names Database, EuroGeoNames (INSPIRE) European infrastructure of geographical names and Croatian experiences. Influence of ISO/TC 211 geographic information ontology standards on standardization of geographical names is discussed. The main relationships between place name ontological objects are defined. Examples are given for: functional, inverse functional, transitive, symmetrical, antisymmetric, reflexive and irreflexive relationships. The ISO/TC 211 geographic information standards, INSPIRE and EuroGeoNames are also using UML schema as object oriented semantics in description of the place name model.

In the article is given overview of processes of standardization of geo-graphical names in Croatia. Standardization of geographical namesdepends on global and regional standardization processes. Activities of Croatia in the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN), world umbrella geographical names standardization body, are described. Croatian Geodetic Institute (CGI) in cooperation with State Geodetic Administration (SGA) is caring activities in UNGEGN. Gazetteer of Croatia is produced, and Gazetteer service is published on the Internet. Croatia joined a EuroGeoNames (EGN) system of European geographical names infrastructure. EGN is regional process of standardization geographical names. It is a part of the European spatial data infrastructure (INSPIRE). Croatian part o EGN system is developed by the Croatian Geodetic Institute. Standardization of the geographical names on the national level is defined trough National Spatial Data Infrastructure. Croatia introduced new map grids in a new projection terrestrial reference system. Names are assigned to the new map sheets.

Since the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and the increasing popularity of mobile devices, many standardization bodies such as OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) had proposed the implementation of Location Based Services (LBS) applications. Furthermore, map service providers started to use the correspondent devices for visualizing geographic data essentially based on the users’ location, his contextual information and his profile. However, many geographic databases (GDBs) could offer slightly different data/metadata for the same requested service. Advanced LBS have to improve interoperability among them. In this paper, we had elaborated many reasoning algorithms and build/match extended geo-ontology framework for the integration of homologous objects on mobile devices. Our approach is illustrated by a tourism LBS case study and could be applied for any geographic domain where position, place name, semantic details and visual aspects’ (icon, texture, color, etc.) ambiguities will be integrated automatically through our platform.

Different fields such as Geovisualization, Web mapping or thematic and topographic cartography all need to incorporate a most recognizable and faithful representation of the real world by different map objects at different scales. The objective of this work was to enhance the existing point selection method - the Polarization Transformation - to an automatic scaledependent point data selection method for multidimensional point data sets, which is implemented in an interactive (Web-) user interface. Benefits of the new method are that in the resulting point selection the global as well as the local characteristics of the spatial point distribution and of the spatial point density are preserved; both for 2D- and 3D- point data sets. Within an interactive user interface the user can upload a point data set, define either the achieved output scale or the wanted number of points to be selected. Then the determined results using the enhanced polarization approach are shown in 2D or 3D to the user. In this work an existing 2D point selection evaluation method for points, based on Voronoi areas, was enhanced for 3D point selection evaluation by using Voronoi volumes. Thus the evaluation verified the similarity of point density and distribution before and after the point data selection.

This paper will present the algorithms developed for the generalization of ditches in the CARGEN project. Despite the increasing number of algorithms available for cartographic generalization, only few of them address directly the problem of typification; noticeably this has been done in the context of building and road network generalization only. Ditches are man made features used to carry water, they are commonly found in groups in rural environments and in maps they are widely used to describe such a landscape. Groups of ditches usually show a regular pattern of straight lines, hence they lend themselves to be generalized through typification. In this paper a novel algorithm for the typification of ditches will be explained. The algorithm has been developed inside the Italian CARGEN project, aiming at the automatic generalization of 1:25000 data from 1:5000 data. The first section introduces typification, followed by brief review of related work in section two; the third section gives a description of the salient features of ditches; all the consideration of section one and three will be then used to set up a generalization algorithm that is explained in section four. Section five illustrates the results and gives a perspective on the future work.

This paper will present a complete process for the generalization of a hydrography network. The process was developed in the Italian CARGEN project, that aims at the generalization of geodatabase data from 1:5000 to 1:25000 scale. The model generalization process relies on the data enrichment of the input model that allowed to re-classify the data according to the output model and to drive the selection assessing the importance of each river. The information gathered is the river width, the Strahler order, the flow direction, the longest path to the furthermost source, the length, the number of branches uphill and the density. The paper will describe how the width of each river was measured, how the classification of the rivers was harmonized, how the flow direction was calculated from the z coordinates, the reconstruction of the river courses and the algorithm for the selection of the rivers both on length and density thresholds.

Many researchers have paid much attention to the importance of individual roads for various applications such as traffic flow analysis and road network generalization. This paper gives a comparative analysis of different properties to determine the importance of individual roads for road network generalization purpose. These properties include one geometric property (length); three topological properties (degree, closeness and betweenness) and one thematic property (road class). Two representative selective omission approaches (stroke-based selection and mesh densitybased elimination) are implemented to generalize road network. For each approach, different properties are respectively used to determine the importance of individual roads. The road network of Hong Kong Island is used as study area for testing and two measures (similarity and connectivity) are employed to evaluate the selections. Results show that, when the stroke-based selection approach is implemented, using length performs best in determining the importance of individual roads, and using betweenness or closeness performs well in preserving the connectivity of the retained network; when the mesh density-based elimination approach is implemented, all these properties have quite similar selections.

Generalization is an important branch in cartography. This process abstracts a map for emphasizing important items and increasing its legibility. On a nautical chart, the purpose is also to emphasize navigational hazards and main navigation routes. Therefore, the cartographer not only adapts the amount of information to the scale of the chart but also selects the information according to the types of features on the seabed and their importance to the navigator. Features are characterized by the isobaths. Methods usually applied on contours for topographic maps cannot be applied on isobaths as they do not take information about features into consideration and a new strategy coordinating different generalization operators must be defined for nautical charts. This paper focuses on isobaths generalization and introduces a new approach based on a multi-agent system. It first introduces the characteristics and constraints of isobath generalization. Then it presents the multi agent model where features and isobaths are represented by agents at different levels. Possible actions performed by each agent are presented with measures for evaluating their results according to generalization constraints.

Multiple representations of geographic objects draw one of the main focuses in modern cartographic research. Initial works were concentrated on multiresolution databases and elevation models derivation through generalization process. Development of interactive computer mapping in 90-00’s lead to growth of interest in visual representations of multilevel objects. However, the task of multiscale mapping of earth topography has not been paid a due attention. In this work a complete technology of making multiscale hypsometric maps is proposed, beginning from scales and projection definition, walking through database design and DEM generalization with novel algorithm and finally outlining map preparation using hypsometric tints, contours and hill shading.

The paper presents a best practice approach for the generalisation of polygon data in a GIS environment.

Cartographic generalisation seeks to summarise geographical information to produce legible maps at smaller scales. Past research led to the development of many automated cartographic generalisation processes, each one being more or less specialised to a particular problem: a landscape like urban areas, a data theme like land use, a cartographic conflict like linear symbol overlap or most of the time of mix of the three. This paper deals with the development of a model allowing collaborative generalisation i.e. the collaboration between automatic processes like these in order to tackle the generalisation of a complete map. CollaGen, our proposed model, allows to partition data in geographic spaces and to find to best suited process to generalise each space. The applications of a process on a space are automatically orchestrated. Interoperability between processes is managed thanks to formal constraints and side effects are monitored after each process application. Results from CollaGen prototype are shown and discussed.