Cartography as Effective and Sustainable Access to Cultural Topics

Many aspects of cultural topics are related to space and may be better understood by using appropriate presentation techniques in this context. For the view of cartography, there is the hypothesis that the research of, and communication among experts in art, history and archaeology may be better supported with the power and tools of Internet-, multimediaand three dimensional cartography. At the present state the digitalisation, recording and database creation of cultural objects and landscapes is an ongoing process using different methods. The main results, according to a first step of modelling, are high detailed reconstructions used for presentation and scientific discussion. In this communicational aspect cartography may offer a spatial-related overview and multilingual access to masses of digital data with the help of visual classification and usage of user-adapted metaphors. The considerations in this paper about a cartographic toolbox offering access to and management of cultural topics are based upon the interplay of data access, effective communication and sustainable information availability.