The Importance of Being Relevant

Mobile cartography aims at producing appropriate presentations of geographic information for mobile users, for instance in the form of map based mobile services. Major influences come from new technologies like Location Based Services. Due to the small displays of mobile devices and specific mobile usage contexts selecting and presenting only the most relevant information is indispensable. The paper argues for considering further relevance types beyond positional relevance used in LBS. First general theories of relevance are discussed before showing the use of the relevance concept in mobile cartography. Based on the relation between mobile usage context and relevance a set of relevance types is derived. Approaches for computing compound relevance measures enable applying the relevance as a filtering criterion or as an attribute that can be visualised. Various graphical means for visualising differences in relevance demonstrate the practical use of relevance measures in mobile cartography and represent a point of departure for further research.