THE ATLAS OF CANADA’S TOPOGRAPHIC MAPS – USER REQUIREMENTS RESEARCH AND PRODUCT IMPLEMENTATION

R.E. Kramers

The Atlas of Canada Program, Natural Resources Canada, Ottawa, Canada

kramers@nrcan.gc.ca

The Government of Canada’s Atlas of Canada has, for over 100 years, produced maps of Canada’s geography and history reflecting its incredible social, environmental and economic diversity. Its scope has always been national, focusing on small scale thematic and reference maps. This paper will describe the research and implementation of a new type of map into the Atlas – large scale topographic. Canada’s National Topographic System is a series of approximately 14,000 maps at 1/50,000 and 1/250,000 scales covering all of Canada’s land area, a total of 9,093,507 square kilometres. These maps are produced using digital methods based on data from the National Topographic Database. The visualization of topographic maps in the Atlas offers seamless coverage using this database and shows up to 147 map feature types. New tools were developed in an adapted mapping user interface. The Canadian Geographical Names Service has been integrated permitting searches and resultant maps of over 350,000 place and feature names. All development followed the Atlas’ user-centred design methodology that put strong emphasis on users’ needs, usage scenarios and usability evaluation. The result is an efficient and effective product for all topographic map users, called Toporama.