THE DUTCH NATIONAL ATLAS IN A GII ENVIRONMENT: THE
APPLICATION OF DESIGN TEMPLATES
M.J. Kraak1, F.J. Ormeling2,
W. Broeder3, E. MacGillavry4, W. Goorbergh5
1 - ITC – Department of Geo-Information Processing, Enschede,
the
2 -
3 - Landkaartje, Rotterdam, the
Netherlands
4 - Webmapper, Utrecht, the Netherland
5 - Geografiek, Utrecht, the Netherlands
kraak@itc.nl
The current activities of the Foundation of
the Scientific Atlas of the
One of the challenges using data available through the GDI is that although standards guarantee compatibility of the data, maps produced, if any, via available geo-services of different data providers will all have their own look. This will hamper an easy comparison of the maps. Some cartographic processing of the data to get comparable designs is required, because the ability to visually compare maps to understand relations between themes is one of the strengths of an atlas. In some cases this comparison can be realized used specific web design option like working with transparency to compare different layers, but sometimes one still need two maps next to each other to properly judge a potential relation.
The solution suggested is atlas design template. These templates should guarantee that all atlas maps are presented in a similar style which should make the maps easy comparable. In addition it should also assist in a simple semi-automatic update of the maps when new data becomes available. But the project has also the ambition to incorporate maps from previous national atlas editions to allow for temporal comparisons. As a side step the possibilities to export the maps to Google Earth will be discussed.