Progress in Cartography

In the past, point data only play a minor role in map generalization, as points are either already the result of generalization or are used for objects which are only shown on large scale maps. Now, with the growing availability of web mapping services the role of point data has changed: Besides route planning, the most common function of web maps is the visualization of user queries for points of interest. The limited size of commonly used displays often results in a smaller scale as would be appropriate for the maps content. The state of the art to resolve occurring cluttered point sets, is on the one hand interactivity and on the other hand the selection of points. Thus, often the available space is not optimally used. Therefore, we propose a displacement method to improve the readability of dense sets of points of interest.

The exponential increase of acquired and managed geospatial data during the last decades, and the development of new hard- and software frameworks are two main drivers which have facilitated technological innovation in computer–animated cartography and cartographic animation (CA). In the Earth sciences cartographic animation are used for investigations, analyses and visual validation of complex settings and allow depicting a higher level of information by combining spatial data and attributes from different sources. To accomplish this, GIS technology is commonly used for processing, management and the presentation of spatial data. Despite the broad application field of GIS technology, temporal, i.e. dynamic, information is usually not covered in full depth and it remains challenging to manage and visualize such information in the same way as spatial information. Consequently, spatiotemporal data models need to be developed and adopted for each individual case by building an underlying structure which allows relating spatial geometry to cartographic as well as thematic attributes, including time. This contribution tries to discuss and establish a conceptual basis for a data model that allows connecting spatial data primitives with temporal attributes in order to manage, query and visualize the animation of map objects on a higher level.

This paper is focused on the point labelling of populated places for multi-scale mapping for the new state map series of the Slovak Republic (SR). The importance of creating new categories suitable for dynamic digital maps as well as the current state of the art is described. The proposed font parameters for the new categorizations are described along with a comparison of the current categorization. Furthermore, new label placement rules as well as the dynamic labelling model created for the populated places are described.

Cartometric evaluation is part of the cartographic generalization process and can indicate which operator should be applied and which features should be generalized. Those decisions are based on the occurrence of geometric conditions and spatial and holistic measures. Those aspects can be understood as legibility and visibility problems, and this knowledge can be described as rules of an expert system. The automation of cartographic generalization is a challenge partly because of subjective decisions made during the process. Cartometric evaluation show this subjectivity. The formalization and automated identification of the representation problems can make this process more holistic and less dependent on human control and influence and, therefore, more efficient. The objective of this paper is to present a method for developing a cartometric evaluation for topographic maps at 1:5000 derived from 1:2000 scale that is appropriate for the Brazilian landscape. Our approach consists of designing an expert system based on a decision tree. We present the first results of the expert system developed using ArcGIS and its application ModelBuilder to detect automatically map representation problems.

The purpose of the paper is to present an ongoing project of AtlasFontium.pl which is intended to serve as a platform for publishing spatially-related historical source data along with their cartographic visualization concerning polish territory. The text describes the main assumptions on which the web page was based, its current state, and characteristics.

Cartographers are facing several challenges in transforming geographic knowledge into interactive webmaps. Of course there are different webmapping technologies that can be used by everybody. Nevertheless implementing special forms of cartographic expression require cartographic knowledge as well as sophisticated programming skills and depend on technical limitations. This paper presents the newly developed cross-media production for the publication series ‘Landschaften in Deutschland’ (LiD) and discusses different webmapping solutions, their benefits and disadvantages as well as some challenges concerning prosumer-webmapping.

This paper presents a refined taxonomy of user tasks and interactive tasks based on a review of the fields of information visualization, geovisualization and visual analytics. Our aim is to find common ground across previous studies to support those who seek parameters for designing visual solutions to users’ domain problems. We first abstract the design procedure for providing visual solutions to address users’ problems as a visual problem-solving approach. Then, we relate user and interactive tasks according to the roles they play in the approach. User tasks, which are translations of user problems, guide the design of the visualization and interactive tasks. Interactive tasks provide users with the means to manipulate the visualization environment to accomplish user tasks. We then identify three primitive user tasks—identify, localize and compare—and all other user tasks are considered as compound tasks consisting of sequential primitives. Furthermore, we extract and merge the interaction operators in interactive tasks with the same or similar functions among the existing taxonomies into eleven categories: re-encode, arrange, coordinate, aggregate/segregate, filter, derive, navigate, query, search, select and enabling. We expect this refined taxonomy to provide a more intuitive view of the logical relations between tasks.

Floating Car Data (FCD) is GNSS-tracked vehicle movement, includes often large data size and is difficult to handle, especially in terms of visualization. Recently, FCD is often the base for interactive traffic maps for navigation and traffic forecasting. Handling FCD includes problems of large computational efforts, especially in case of connecting tracked vehicle positions to digitized road networks and subsequent traffic state derivations. Established interactive traffic maps show one possible visual representation for FCD. We propose a user-adapted map for the visual analysis of massive vehicle movement data. In our visual analysis approach we distinguish between a global and a local view on the data. Global views show the distribution of user-defined selection areas, in the way of focus maps. Local views show user-defined polygons with 2-D and 3-D traffic parameter visualizations and additional diagrams. Each area selection is timestamped with the time of its creation by the user. After defining a number of area selections it is possible to calculate weekday-dependent travel times based on historical taxi FCD. There are 3 different types of defined connections in global views. This has the aim to provide personalization for specific commuters by delivering only traffic and travel time information for and between user-selected areas. In a case study we inspect traffic parameters based on taxi FCD from Shanghai observed within 15 days in 2007. We introduce test selection areas, calculate their average traffic parameters and compare them with recent (2015) and typical traffic states coming from the Google traffic layer.

The paper elaborates on the spatial-temporal modeling of linguistic and dialect phenomena. Language Geography—a branch of Human Geography—tries to enhance the visual exploration of linguistic data, and utilizes a number of methodologies from GIScience, whereas publications focusing on analyzing linguistic data in GIScience are hard to find. This research work highlights the representation of language and/or dialect regions with combined indeterminate and crisp boundaries—i.e. frontiers and borders. Both boundary “types” are necessary in order to model the spatial-temporal dynamics of language phenomena. The article analyzes the emerging, ending, moving and merging of linguistic/dialect regions and phenomena with respect to space and time and the boundary types. In order to represent frontiers or indeterminate boundaries, fuzzy logic is employed.

This paper illustrates the results of a research project focused on the development of a Web 2.0 system designed to compute and visualize building energy performance large-scale maps. The workflow and the framework include: emerging platform-independent technologies such as WebGL for data presentation, an extended version of the EU-Founded project TABULA/EPISCOPE for building energy parameters estimation and a data model based on CityGML OGC standard. The proposed platform will allow citizens, public administrations and government agencies to perform city-wide analyses on the energy performance of building stocks. To evaluate the accuracy of the model, the simulation results were compared to real data of energy performance of the energy certificates available and the model uncertainties were analyzed.

Interactive atlas systems are products of high cartographic quality and user-targeted functionality. The main challenge for future digital atlases will be to incorporate the new trends of 3D mapping, online and mobile applications into atlas design. The Atlas of Switzerland, an example of a mature digital atlas, tries to advance these trends together with existing atlas functions in its next version. Starting with the concept of an online 3D atlas, this article explains the architectural implications of an atlas based on a virtual globe engine. By embedding the globe in a modern graphical user interface and implementing cartographic 3D visualizations, it is intended to strengthen the position of the atlas against other online mapping services.

This research explores the usage of freely available open-source resources for the deployment of a plug-in free web-application interface for 3D geospatial data to visualize energy related modelling and simulation results. Such plug-in free web mapping applications will be essential for future cartographic web applications as forthcoming web browsers will no longer support the usage and installation of those plug-ins used in the past. As a proof of concept, a 3D city model of the city of Karlsruhe in Germany consisting of over 87,000 buildings is used as a case study. This data set was compiled using OpenStreetMap data and outputs from energy simulation models. The CityGML format is used for data storage of this multi-domain data set. In order to ensure independence from browser plug-ins, HTML5 and freely available JavaScript libraries are used for the creation of this application. Multiple analytical cartographic and geospatial functions such as cartographic classification, attribute selection, descriptive statistics, spatial buffer analysis and the retrieval of modelling results from a PostgreSQL and PostGIS data infrastructure are implemented in this interface. This paper further discusses some case studies, future enhancement opportunities of the proposed interface and experiences gathered during the interface development process that would help other cartographers and GIScientists in developing future native 3D web mapping applications.

The paper describes a workflow of planetary mapping using the newest remote sensing data and modern GIS technologies. We present the newly developed tools for planetary surface analysis based on cartographic measurements. The data management and design approaches for planetary mapping are described, and the main results of implementation of tools and methods are presented, including new planetary maps.

The SDI4Apps project has collected a large number of points of interest (POIs). The Smart Points of Interest (SPOI) represents a seamless and open resource of POIs covering all the world. Its principal target has been to provide information for cycling as Linked data together with other data sets containing road network. But the current version can be used for any purposes related to tourism. The article presents the data model for POIs as a basis for harmonization of external data sources into this data model. The current version of the SPOI data set includes a harmonized combination of selected OpenStreetMap data, GeoNames.​org, experimental geo-ontologies developed at the University of West Bohemia and local data. The data model follows the recommendations for RDF data sets, semantic data, and Linked Data as well as the data model published in Points of Interest Core. The SPOI knowledge base complies with the 5-star rating system of Linked Open Data. The data model re-uses several important, respected and standardized formats and vocabularies such as XML, XML Schema, RDF, RDFS, SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), GeoSPARQL or FOAF (Friend of a Friend).

Cartographic production and publishing are related to many aspects including data availability and legislative requirements. They are highly relevant to the map making process from its beginning to the possibility of extending the final step. The modern trends of Open Data have a significant impact on the development of cartography and its essential part—knowledge of licences. Intellectual property is crucial in the era of the information society. Unfortunately, the debate over the appropriate scope of intellectual property protection for spatial data and geodatabases mostly ignores the role of cartography and spatial data uniqueness in the setting of the rights. The law essentially requires the authorization to apply the right to use a work (licence) to another person. There are possible arrangements and licensing agreements where no such authorization is needed (open licences), in some cases is it also possible to use authors work in situations prescribed by law. In most instances it is, however, necessary to know licensing rules to allow practical work with data sources and work disclosure. Knowledge of licensing becomes essential for the process of contemporary cartographic production. Spatial digital data are often under copyright protection as geodatabases. Due to the territoriality of copyright protection, it is very important to know the specific licence terms and conditions. The uniqueness of spatial data compared to other information, is that it is often necessary to combine different data sources. Moreover, it is the combination of the various data sources that often cause a problem because of the requirement for separate licences.

The chorographic world maps cannot go missing from the atlases for the general public and for schools. Among other requirements, their map distortions are usually expected to be minimal. In the aphylactic projections both the angular and area distortions can be reduced by the principle of “balance of errors”. Equations for the mapping functions help us to search pseudocylindrical projections showing minimum distortions according to the Kavrayskiy criterion, while the outline shape of the mapped Earth is monitored. Some of the best solutions are demonstrated in this paper.

Knowing a map’s projection is of essential importance, particularly when using them as a source for creating derivative works or dealing with them in a GIS environment. However, (especially on older maps), projection information is often absent or partially present. Our objective is to develop a semi-automated approach for determining the projection of a small-scale map, based on the shape and secondary properties of its graticule lines—as outlined in the hierarchy published by Érdi-Krausz (Studia Cartologica 1:194–270, 1958). To this end, a web-based tool is created, explicitly designed to be usable by a non-professional audience. Drawing tools are provided for manually tracing graticule lines on pre-uploaded raster maps. Given the approximate traces, we employ a number of algorithms to determine the shape and secondary properties (e.g. equidistancy, concentricity, angles of intersection etc.) of graticule lines. Having computed these properties, one can fit the projection into Érdi-Krausz’s system.

The “Atlas de Cuba” was published in 1949 by the Institute of Geographical Exploration at Harvard University. This atlas is result of collaboration between Erwin Raisz, the American cartographer born in Hungary and a Cuban geographer and cartographer, Gerardo Canet. Using Canet’s words in the Introduction, the atlas is “a living picture of Cuban Geography as far as possible in 64 pages”. A total of 34 themes were represented by maps and graphics, presenting the history of the country, its’ physical geographical characteristics, the major parameters to describe the society (standard of living, health, social composition, government, etc.) and the national economy. The atlas is the rich combination of maps with pictures, charts and text. The authors not only wanted to create an atlas for scientists and specialists with the different topics represented in the maps: their intention was to make all this information available and easily understandable for the public in general. The atlas joined two peculiar cartographic styles: the delicacy of the drawing ability of Erwin Raisz and Canet’s interest to represent the broader spectrum of data collected by him, using all the graphic tools at their disposal to make the atlas more attractive. This little masterpiece of the mid-twentieth century constitutes a gem intentionally ignored by the current Cuban cartography.

The historical Habsburg Tyrol was extensively mapped from the 18th to the 20th centuries, since it represented the “south of Mitteleuropa”. These historical maps have their main foci on the southern boundaries and rivers network: measuring the Empires as a form of practical geopolitics through state “sponsorship”. In this mainly methodological paper a cartographic time-series was considered as a data-set, one which starts after the First Military Survey (not including the Tyrol): from Kriegskarte by von Zach (1798–1805, 1:28.800), to the Third Military Survey (1869–87, 1:25.000). Faced with cartographies composed of hundreds of map-sheets, with a good positional accuracy and mainly not georeferenced, it is necessary to place them in a common reference system (ETRF89 UTM), in order to compare with present-day reference maps for geospatial analysis and dissemination purposes: each map-sheet needs to be localizable avoiding a massive initial georeferencing/mosaicking process onto the whole data-set. Thus, our current work centres on developing a methodology for regional purposes, using a map-sheets overview (index map-sheet), often neglected in a GIS-framework. Using archival documents alongside maps and contemporary literature, the native reference systems were investigated. The 4-step map-to-map workflow is: (a) assign to index-maps the native (or comparable) reference system; (b) shift from Ferro to Greenwich (longitude rotation); (c) perform the geographic datum transformation to WGS84; (d) reproject in ETRF89 UTM. The first results are georeferenced index-maps that readily provide the 4-corner coordinates of each map-sheet for subsequent georeferencing, assigning the corner coordinates (from index-map) to corresponding corner-points (onto a single sheet) without identifying landmark/control points on old and reference maps.

Spatial thinking has lately been acknowledged as an important ability both for sciences and for everyday life. There is a clear need for enhancing spatial thinking in education and engaging both educators and learners in more critical, inquiry-based teaching and learning methods. In this context, GEOTHNK project is a European effort to propose a scientifically grounded, technologically sustainable, and organizationally disruptive framework for the development of learning pathways for enhancing spatial thinking across education sectors and learning environments.

In this paper a new revised undergraduate course on Thematic Cartography (TC) is presented as a 5 ECTS compulsory core course of the 300 ECTS undergraduate curriculum of a relevant European University engineering School leading to a five years engineering degree, comparable to the MEng degree, after the submission of the diploma dissertation. The paper presents the underlying philosophy for the course design, respecting fundamental criteria of university education and considering the fact that this TC compulsory course is the basis of a series of other nine cartography plus GIS related elective courses available in the curriculum, oriented in various engineering disciplines (geodesy and surveying, cadastre and photogrammetry, infrastructure engineering, including road construction, transportation, hydraulic works, environmental engineering). This course is focused not only on the theoretical issues of TC but also on implementation in terms of a web-based course, targeting at the familiarisation of the students with a series of relevant free software applications in relation with the mining of relevant data from the EUROSTAT free provider, in order to develop modularly a TC project. It is shown how this key course covers the educational and student needs of a spectrum of other courses that follow in the engineering curriculum and raises an overall interest of engineering students for cartographic science and technologies.

This article is based on our participation in the workshop “Envisioning the Future of Cartographic Research,” one of the ICC 2015 pre-conferences. In order to answer the question posed to the workshop participants—“How can we best develop a systematic understanding of the intersection between human abilities (perception, cognition, affective), design decisions (graphic and interactions), and map use context?”—we realized that from the results of some of our research projects, it may be possible to build a systematic understanding of human abilities, design decisions, and map use context under the assumption that the design of a geo-information product could be developed in agreement with the user-centred design (UCD) approach. This article aims, then, to present some results of our research projects, the main goal of which is to develop investigations that are defined based on the relationship between geo-information solutions and the theory of cartography and geoscience. Those projects have been in development for the last 10 years, and here we describe six of them: two at the doctoral level and four at master’s level.

Spatial data resources have become very important phenomena in Europe within the last few decades. They are especially important in large cities due to the urbanisation trend. The expansion of urban areas due to the rise in the population and economic growth is increasing demand on natural resources, thereby causing land use changes. It is expected that by 2040, more than 60 % of the world’s population will live in cities. In order to manage sustainable development and support e-governance processes, the efficient integration of relevant spatial data is needed. Land use data deliver an asset for local governments to develop better strategy for urbanistic planning, in order to manage land in a sustainable way. This work presents the methodology used to collect VGI observations for land use area definition based on the LUCAS (Land Use and Cover Area frame Survey) fieldwork methodology, HILUCS (Hierarchical INSPIRE Land Use Classification System), and reference topographic dataset. The practical research work was performed in June 2014 during the GIS Summer School in the city of Zagreb, in a dual collaboration between the Faculty of Geodesy, University of Zagreb and Faculty of Horticulture and Landscape Engineering, Slovak University of Agriculture in Nitra. The results try to offer and verify a suitable proposal for fieldwork methodology and updating a land use database in line with the INSPIRE directive applicable at the local spatial data infrastructure level.

The work done deals with the concept of Volunteered Geographic Information and is based on the use of a mobile mapping collection tool to retrieve geographical data from an urban fieldwork. The research has been carried on during the academic year 2014/2015, involving students from the course of Geography of Networks within the post graduate degrees in ‘Economics’ and ‘Business’ of the University of Trieste (Italy). The intent was testing the potential of crowdsourcing in retrieving data using a bottom up approach, relying on a set of trained and aware ‘urban sensors’ as data collectors. This allowed us to derive first-hand geographical data concerning a particular topic and analyze its spatial distribution by means of Geographical Information Systems and spatial analytical tools. The topic studied was represented by the urban ‘movida’, the analysis of the areas of the city that are more or less active during the days and during the week. This major aim was also coupled with an ancillary one, as the coverage of Wi-Fi hotspots and networks over the urban area of Trieste. It is known that many Italian cities still do not allow a very wide coverage of wireless networks to access the Internet. The city of Trieste, on the border between Italy and Slovenia, is suited with a certain degree of coverage, particularly in main roads and squares, thanks to free Wi-Fi coverage managed by the municipality and an academic network of Eduroam system, quite spread over European and world cities hosting universities and research centers.

Different forms of spatial descriptions are used to communicate information in the context of navigation in urban environments. When generated by computers, such descriptions are combinations of map features in a predefined way. Unlike computers, however, people are capable of flexibly generating navigational spatial descriptions by taking into account a wide array of different contextual factors, e.g. a user’s prior knowledge and the structure of the environment. This paper deploys the notion of pragmatics to compare formal addresses, route descriptions (generated either by computers or humans), and destination descriptions in terms of their adaptability to contextual factors in order to identify the means to creating more cognitively sound information systems.

The combined use of mobile Augmented Reality (AR) and various visualizations has a potential to support geography fieldwork. Central to the development of a usable mobile tool is adopting the principle of User-Centered Design (UCD), the first phase of which is identifying user requirements. This research first establishes the current situation of using (mobile) AR in education based on a literature review. At the same time, in a real educational human geography fieldwork executed in China, through a survey, observation and interviews, we have investigated how teachers and students currently conduct the fieldwork, what difficulties they experience and their expectations and suggestions for a future mobile tool. It was found out that it will be practical to make use of a new mobile AR tool in geography fieldwork. In the fieldwork in China, students used their mobile phones to mainly collect data and browse digital maps of the fieldwork area, with the purposes of completing the fieldwork tasks and assisting them to geographically understand the fieldwork area, respectively. They also experienced some difficulties, e.g., the time required for and troubles in switching between different mobile applications and the data collected in the field lacking locational details. Both teachers and students, as users, expressed their expectations of a future mobile tool and indicated some basic key requirements, e.g., labeling geo-locations of all field collected data, making notes, recording voice data and field walking routes and optionally viewing various materials (maps, satellite images, etc.) of the fieldwork area.

The prevalence of smartphones and tablets featuring various kinds of sensors and the improvements in computation capabilities of those devices, have led to an acceleration of using geospatial data in many domains. The large number of sensors deployed on the devices has made it possible to detect user’s location, heading and orientation as well as getting contextual information from various sources of online data. Combining the stream of data from positioning and orientation sensors with camera, has also made it more feasible to deploy practical Augmented Reality (AR) applications on mobile devices. This paper, explains a system and its related study that provides a view of the navigation experience which composed of the AR view as well as continuous personal feedbacks about the relative location of the user in relation to the closest landmarks. In the system, navigation and path finding are based on landmarks. Relative position of the user with regard to landmark is determined using GPS sensors as well as image processing algorithm for finding distance from a landmark. In addition, feedbacks for navigation instructions are customized for each user based on his/her movement profile and use of continuous tuning of a machine learning algorithm. Experiment of using the system showed a significant improvement in acquiring of spatial knowledge for the users in comparison with turn-by-turn systems.

By now geoinformation is available everytime and modern maps rule our daily life. Whenever we leave our homes, we have made plans where to go to. If it is a new route we have generally used a map (application). We plan the way that we need to take or evaluate the transport network and its connections. If we feel lost, we take another look in the map and/or try to find reference semantics which will bring us back to our geospatial imagery—our individual mental picture of the world. At the same time, in our cross-linked world, we produce tons of unstructured data that describe the way we use our environment (nature, things and people). For example: when do we need electricity? For what actions? How much do we consume to what time of the day or in which situation? Does this electricity usage change with our age, education, employment—or any other demographic value? What is the impact of the surrounding topography on our electricity needs? All these questions can be answered by data that we leave in space with our actions and devices in addition to existing geospatial core data. In order to make use of unstructured data, we have to ask questions which allow for a first requirement analysis and lead to the primary model of data: a first data structure considering our questionnaire requirements. These models are worth distributing because a lot of questions are similar and variety of people could make value out of it. Information about validity, lineage, purpose of creation, recording method, and so on are needed to evaluate the data for specific use cases. This contribution describes a work in progress on the role of Service Oriented Mapping in spatial and regional sciences by means of a use case in health geography. Therefore it follows the thesis that specific requirements for the analysis, regional investigation and knowledge transmission in regional sciences exist. These specific requirements could be extensively supported by the specific structure of Service-Oriented Mapping. Some requirements of regional sciences as well as the offers of Service-Oriented Mapping will be exemplified on the basis of a case study “health geographies”. Future tasks for the field of Service-Oriented Mapping and its communication issues could be elaborated from this first requirements analysis and a main future perspective of “Service-Oriented regional sciences” could be formulated.