Michael P. Peterson

Location based services and telecartography

From the Contents: General Aspects of LBS and TeleCartography.- Positioning.- Modelling and Awareness.- Visualisation and Cortographic Communication.- Applications.

Active legends for interactive cartographic animation

Active legends in cartographic animation serve the dual purpose of controlling the display of a map sequence and providing necessary information about the individual frames. Legends for cartographic animations have typically been implemented in a non-interactive form as individual legends that are synchronized with the display of the map. An active legend creates a tactual/visual association between the individual maps in the animation and what they depict. The development of more interactive cartographic animations is a function of both the available technology and the operational metaphors that make the technology accessible. The Web is providing a means to distribute interactive animations. A particular interactive cartographic animation developed with JavaScript is evaluated for functionality and content.

Maps and the Internet: An Introduction

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the adoption of the Internet as a medium of communication that has been particularly rapid since the appearance of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the early 1990s. The number of Internet users has increased dramatically as the technology has spread around the world. In the process, the dominant means of map distribution has also changed. The number of maps distributed through the Internet on a daily basis is estimated at over 200 million, which is more than that printed on paper each day. Printing on paper is expensive, especially in large format and in color. It is simply less expensive to place color graphics on the Web than it is to print on paper. The Internet has fundamentally changed the way spatial information is communicated. Its development is dependent on the understanding and advancement of this form of map delivery. . There are three general types of maps that are available through the Internet: static, interactive and animated.

Elements of Multimedia Cartography

Cartography is in the process of change. Like all technological developments, the computer makes our work both easier and more difficult — and multimedia cartography is not easy. How must cartography react to these changes? We have to begin using new definitions in cartography. The word “map,” for example, should perhaps be redefined to refer to an interactive map display. If the presentation of the information is not controlled by the user — it’s not a map. If there is no interaction — it’s not a map. If there is no potential for animation — it’s not a map. We may eventually realise that what we call maps today are simply static map elements — as much a piece of the puzzle as a single symbol on a map.

Cartography and the Internet: Introduction and Research Agenda

The Internet is helping to redefine how maps are used. Maps are now delivered to the user in a fraction of the time required to distribute maps on paper allowing them to be viewed in a more timely fashion. Weather maps, for example, are posted on an hourly basis. Most importantly, maps on the Internet are more interactive. They are accessed through a hyperlinking structure that makes it possible to engage the map user on a higher-level than is possible with a map on paper. Finally, the Internet is ma.king the distribution of cartographic animations possible. The Internet presents cartographers with a faster method of map distribution, different forms of mapping, and new areas of research.

Chapter 1 – Maps and the Internet: An Introduction

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the adoption of the Internet as a medium of communication that has been particularly rapid since the appearance of the World Wide Web (WWW) in the early 1990s. The number of Internet users has increased dramatically as the technology has spread around the world. In the process, the dominant means of map distribution has also changed. The number of maps distributed through the Internet on a daily basis is estimated at over 200 million, which is more than that printed on paper each day. Printing on paper is expensive, especially in large format and in color. It is simply less expensive to place color graphics on the Web than it is to print on paper. The Internet has fundamentally changed the way spatial information is communicated. Its development is dependent on the understanding and advancement of this form of map delivery. . There are three general types of maps that are available through the Internet: static, interactive and animated.

An Evaluation of Unclassed Crossed-Line Choropleth Mapping

In Toblers unclassed mapping, the computer is used to create a virtually continuous array of crossed-line shadings from white to black, thus eliminating the need to generalize quantitative area distributions into classes. Criticism of this method has centered on potential interpretation difficulties for the map user. These and other issues have been examined through subject testing. A preliminary test concerning the relationship between calculated and perceived values for crossed-line shadings showed that people tend to underestimate value differences and an exponent was derived to compensate for this underestimation. A comparative evaluation between unclassed and traditional class-interval methods of choropleth mapping based on critical attributes of choropleth map communication indicate that judgments of both relative and absolute values for individual areas are improved with the unclassed method while there is little difference in the quality of the overall pattern produced by the two methods, at leas...

Online maps with APIs and WebServices

Online Mapping with APIs.- XML in Online Mapping.- Web Map Design for a Multipublishing Environment Based on Open APIs.- Mapping Social-Network Interactions.- WebGIS Systems for Planetary Data Access at the PDS Geosciences Node.

Interactive Cartographic Animation

A major obstacle in the development of cartographic animation has been a lack of automated techniques for the interactive creation and viewing of map sequences. A microcomputer program for choropleth mapping makes the interactive creation and viewing of cartographic animations possible. The potential uses of this type of animation extend beyond the depiction of temporal change. The interactive cartographic animation procedure involves the creation of individual maps, at less than one second each; their storage as screen images in the computers memory; and their subsequent display at speeds up to 60 frames a second. User-interface considerations were an important aspect of the implementation.

Evaluating a Map's Image

Recent psychological evidence suggests that mental images are a functional part of human thought. The mental resources enabling people to deal with image information are of central concern in cartographic communication. This study deals with the goodness of the image information derived from a map display. The term pattern quality describes the quality of an internal image founded upon the apparent form or pattern in the spatial display. Maps can be shown to differ in pattern quality. Four graduated-symbol displays were tested in both unshaded and completely shaded forms. Subjects provided dissimilarity estimates of ten different distributions under two testing conditions. In the first test, pairs of maps were arranged, for comparison, on the same test page (simultaneous viewing). In the second test, maps were placed, for comparison, on successive pages (remembered viewing). Non-metric multidimensional scaling was used to convert the dissimilarity estimates of the ten mapped distributions for every symbol...