A Cartographic Data Model for Better Geographical Visualization Based on Knowledge

Firstly, this paper makes analyses on the geographical visualization and mapping functionality in GIS software which have some shortcomings. So, the idea of geographical information cartographic representation is presented to improve the quality of the geographical information visualization and to satisfy rules of traditional cartography. The digital cartographic representation, which tries to make a model of the mapping procedure based on traditional cartographic knowledge, creates a template-mapping model for cartographic symbols. This template-mapping model achieves the transformation from cartographic specifications to products. Meanwhile, it can well consider characteristics of respective geographical feature, the relations between this feature and other features, the relations between this feature and cartographic region. These three kinds of relations are described with quantity parameters which can be used to map a symbol template to a symbol instance responding to some one geographical feature. With this template-mapping model for cartographic symbol, we can visualize the respective feature’s property in detail and improve the quality of geographical visualization. Hydrology and transportation features are taken as two examples to verify the availability of this cartographic representation model. * Corresponding author