Adaptive Concepts for a Mobile Cartoraphy

GISs are moving away from a system for experts to a more widely-used tool for answering spatial-related questions. The dawn of new technologies on the horizon, such as telecommunication, mobile Internet, and handheld computing devices, offers new chances to the everyday use of geoinformation. However, existing approaches to mobile visualisation of geoinformation mostly have a commercial background and are rather technology-centred. This quite narrow view ignores many relevant problems and does not fully profit from the new possibilities a mobile cartography could provide. Taking the existing problems into account the paper sketches a general conceptual framework for geoinformation use in a mobile environment. Specific user tasks and requests in a mobile environment are identified, which is followed by an outline of possible methods to personalise a GIS for better mobile assistance. Putting emphasis on the importance of analytical functions for mobile cartography, the process of adaptive and dynamic generation of visualisations for mobile users on the basis of vector data (e.g. SVG) is illustrated and the key research fields involved are pointed out. Introduction For years GISs have been a tool for experts, running only on expensive machines requiring many skills. In the early nineties easy-to-use desktop GISs were introduced. With the widespread Internet and web mapping a further " democratisation " of geoinforma-tion use took place. And now, after the tremendous success of Internet and cellular telephone in the last decade, the next technological wave seems to be the convergence of the two: the mobile Internet. This brings web GIS and web mapping a step further, since the dissemination of digital geospatial data is no longer bounded to the desktop platform .