PORTRAYAL SCHEMA DESIGN AND MECHANISM FOR MAP PERSONALIZATION

C. Kurokawa, M. Ota

Kokusai Kogyo Co.,Ltd.,Tokyo, Japan

chikako_kurokawa@kkc.co.jp

A map, one of the methodologies for representing Geographic Information (GI), is designed for versatile uses in general. They are useful for mutual understanding of the real world. However, they are sometimes awkward for users because maps do not fulfill their personal requirements.

“Ubiquitous mapping” is a function that people can access any map at anywhere and anytime through the information network (Ota, 2004) and is expected to solve such problems. Personalization and visualization are big issues to realize the mechanism of ubiquitous mapping, because we have to store enormous amounts of GI if we accommodate personalized GI to answer every user requirements.

However, reusability of GI will improve by modeling features with drawing parameters which are independent from features. Feature is defined as “abstraction of real world phenomena” in ISO/TC211 Standards, and it consists of “attributes (spatial, temporal, and thematic)”, “relationships with other features (inheritance and association)” and “operations”. Geographic data is a set of feature instances that comply with feature types. Spatial attributes are used for visualization, while temporal attributes are used to produce animations and thematic attributes are used for design of figures in geographic data representations. Drawing parameters in this paper are data for geographic data representation in maps such as symbols and parameters to put symbols such as positions, angles and offsets. It is the underlying concept in ISO 19117 “Portrayal”, one of ISO/TC211 Standards, to separate drawing parameters from feature instances.

We design practical portrayal schemas which are independent from geographic data based on the concept of ISO19117 and build prototype visualization system based on these schemas to provide the basic mechanism for standardization and personalization in spatial data representation in this paper. We create and register drawing parameters which are instances of portrayal schemas as user’s typical preferences, and represent personalized maps by switching over those preferences with this system. To provide personalized maps automatically, we extract situations where users want to get personalized maps, systematize words to describe situations and join them with colors, and then we store such information about users’ recognition for colors and personal preferences.

Good representations for individuals are of great variety according to their purposes, however, registration of portrayal parameters makes it possible to visualize same geographic data in different styles, and those parameters can be applied to other spatial data sets.