BUILDING A CARTOGRAPHIC QUALITY CONTROL SYSTEM ON TOPOGRAPHIC MAP PRODUCTION

H.P. Dalkiran, O. Simav, M. Ustun

General Command of Mapping, Cartography, Ankara, Turkiye

mehmet.ustun@hgk.mil.tr

Managing Spatial Data needs deep understanding of the data and its nature of the relation with the geographical objects. Once it is obvious in most cases, unlike a common data, the spatial data has its own behaviors which can not be easily estimated while starting a quality control process. However, there are widely used data collecting and digitizing criteria and rules, so there are no fully standard procedures for quality control system which is applied to spatial data and databases for Spatial Data Producers. To find a proper way for quality checking and error correction methods, each producer needs to develop its own quality control system which fits to her geodatabase structure.

In this case, General Command of Mapping (GCM) in Türkiye has been developing such a quality control management system for her spatial data to produce Cartographic Vector Maps which have been manufactured since 1999. The existent data was very complex and the system developed in 3 years. The spatial data is not an easy fairy tale giant to fight with the Quality Control weapon. It needs a hard study and training for many different situations to deal with. In GCM, there are around three thousand Cartographic Vector Maps in 7 years. Meanwhile the digitizing, cartographic editing rules and criteria have been changed many times for the 1:25 000 scaled topographic maps. There are many different types of coverages that have distinctive attributes and spatial relations to be handled. We have to resolve many errors and problems while developing automation, semi-automation and manual process procedures. Also the optimization of the system was necessary to gain more effective results in a short time. In this article you will find the very abstract of the whole story, the walls faced with, the problems occurred, some statistical results and the lessons learned for developing such a quality management system.

In this study; a cartographic quality control system based on topographic map production is deeply examined and useful set of rules have been extracted after many years’ experience. All these experiences were transformed as separate software which is highly integrated with map production system.