Theoretical foundations of digital cartography. Digital cartography Compilation and design of maps

You can count from one thousand nine hundred and fifty-seven. This year, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) produced the first digital model of the map's relief and terrain, which was subsequently used to design highways. This indicates that in cartography, from the mid-twentieth century, new technological map-making and map-publishing processes and methods began to develop, which have been improved to the present day. The main directions and trends for improvement in them can be identified:

• technological (electronic) methods for creating maps;
• digital ways of organizing banks and databases;
• geoinformation mapping technologies;
• formation of maps in computer networks;
• development of virtual mapping.

For more effective use of scientific and technological processes in the development of cartography, the fastest delivery of the products created by it to the end user is required. Then they will be promptly used by consumers to solve specific problems they set. In modern realities, all scientific and production sectors, including digital cartography, are focused on meeting such requests and needs of society. Thus, with the help of digital technologies, cartography is transformed from educational and simple means of orientation into mathematical tools and methods of design, organization, management and planning. It is already obvious that technological progress has influenced the ways of using cards, of which we highlight the following:

• communication methods;
• spatial information;
• systemic decision making.

The essence of digital cartography

Digital cartography can be presented in three or even four meaningful forms:

• section of cartographic science;
• manufacturing industry;
• new technology.
• tool for visualizing images of cartographic products.

First of all, as a branch of cartographic science, digital cartography is engaged in the study and display of the spatial location of various objects of social activity, all kinds of natural phenomena, their digital modeling and relationships.

With the application and use of automated manufacturing processes, new computer technologies and a diverse visual range of images, digital cartography is particularly popular among both consumers and specialists. The production of cartographic products, as an industrial production, is a multifunctional technological process using modern technologies and is in demand as an electronic product.

It is worth remembering how maps were previously constructed. Entire full-time cartographic groups and thematic parties were created, the services of which arose in production. All received shooting information was recorded in ink on tracing paper or a denser base. The high labor intensity, significant time costs and scrupulousness in the entire mapping process made the process slow. Now all this is being replaced by computer technology, with the possibility of faster and more accurate execution of projects, ease of updating and editing maps.

Benefits of digital mapping

Comparing all the previous and current capabilities of various methods of constructing maps, including the economic component of market efficiency, we can highlight the following advantages of digital cartography:

• transmission of accurate information about the object, virtually eliminating the possibility of errors, due to the use of computer automation in calculations;
• speed of processing and obtaining the final result with higher labor productivity;
• a more economical way to create maps with less labor;
• the possibility and convenience of both editing and periodically updating maps on the same mathematical and geodetic basis.

It should also be noted that digital cartography is increasingly occupying space in the global information flow, penetrating into various areas of interesting modern life on the planet and winning over significant layers of users of its products, thereby creating increased demand. This situation occurs as it develops:

• new (computer) technologies of cartographic and geographic information systems;
• new (space) methods of geodetic spatial positioning and determining the location of all objects;
• improving the compilation of maps, increasing the accuracy and speed of mastering new popular cartographic products.

Types of digital cartographic production

Digital mapping production in its modern form is engaged in the following production processes to obtain certain results:

• development of digital standard maps and other cartographic materials necessary for this in the form of information arrays of the entire set of objects;
• creation of thematic maps using existing digital mathematical and cartographic foundations;
• maintaining digital databases of various information, including state borders;
• digital mapping based on satellite and aerial photographs;
• digital application of topographic map construction.

Digital mapping production processes

Digital cartography is a complex technological product that represents cartographic production, consisting of the following production processes:

• editorial preparatory period for compiling a digital map;
• incoming control of source materials;
• classification of objects of prepared documentation;
• object encodings;
• descriptions of digital map objects;
• editing maps;
• quality control;
• updates;
• conversion to exchange format;
• conversion to a given format;
• digitization of map materials;
• vectorization of maps;
• automation of cartographic generalization;
• digital map summary;
• control of card summary;
• transfer to the Topographic Maps Fund.

Digital cartography and GIS

In the last decade, cartography has been experiencing a period of profound changes and technological innovations caused by the computerization of science, production and society as a whole. There was a need to revise and redefine many concepts of this scientific discipline. For example, back in 1987, two working groups on cartographic definitions and concepts were created within the International Cartographic Association. Moreover, one of the main questions to be studied and resolved was the question of whether cartography can be defined without the concept of “map” and whether GIS or its elements should be included in this definition. In 1989. The working group proposed the following definition: "Cartography is the organization and communication of geographically referenced information in graphical or digital form; it can include all stages from collection to display and use of data." The concept of “map” is not included in this definition, but is proposed to be considered separately as “a holistic (i.e., holistic, structural) representation and mental abstraction of geographical reality, intended for one or more purposes and transforming the corresponding geographical data into works presented in visual, digital or tactile forms."

These definitions have caused widespread debate among cartographers, and as a result, an alternative definition of cartography has emerged, in which it is considered as “the organization, display, communication and use of spatially coordinated information presented in graphical, digital and tactile forms; may include all stages from data collection before their use in creating maps or other spatial information documents."

According to the majority of modern cartographers, the technological aspects of cartography are not the main ones in the era of computer science and all definitions of cartography through technology are erroneous. Cartography remains an applied, predominantly visual discipline in which communication aspects are of great importance. It is also erroneous to evaluate computer maps in the sense of their similarity and indistinguishability from maps created by hand. The real significance of GIS technology lies precisely in the possibility of creating new types of works. With all this, the main task of cartography remains the knowledge of the real world, and here it is very difficult to separate the form (cartographic display) from the content (reflected reality). The progress of geographic information technologies has only increased the range of data subject to mapping and expanded the range of scientific disciplines that require cartography. Screen (display) maps and electronic atlases, which are now becoming part of national cartographic programs in many countries, only strengthen the connections of cartography with computer graphics and GIS, without, however, changing the essence of mapping.

It should be noted that digital cartography in genetic terms is not a direct continuation of traditional (paper) cartography. It has evolved with the overall development of GIS software and is therefore often viewed as a secondary GIS component that, unlike GIS software, does not require a large investment of effort and money. Thus, an untrained user using existing GIS software after several days of training can already create a simple digital map, but even in a month he is not able to create workable GIS software. On the other hand, as cartographers note, due to its apparent ease and simplicity, digital cartography is underestimated with all the ensuing consequences.

Digital cartography has taken on a life of its own and its connection to traditional cartography is often seen as completely unnecessary. As you know, creating a traditional paper map requires quite complex equipment, as well as a team of experienced specialists (cartographers-designers) who create and edit maps and perform routine work on processing the primary material. This is a technically and technologically very complex and labor-intensive process. On the other hand, to create a digital map you only need a personal computer, external devices, software and the original (generally paper) map. In other words, any user gets the opportunity to create digital maps in the form of finished products - digital maps for sale. As a result, a lot of non-professionals are currently engaged in digital mapping, and separation from the theory and methodology of traditional cartography leads to a loss of quality in the transfer of geometric and topological forms of map objects, because the ability to draw well on paper is not enough for high-quality digitization (digitization is a more complex process, since how one has to qualitatively approximate continuous curves with straight line segments). At the same time, the quality of design suffers: often printed maps “resemble a certain drawing with a set of color spots, but not a map.”

Only recently, with the development of the GIS market, the need for high-quality digital maps has begun to increase; users began to pay attention not only to the speed of digitizing cards and their low price, but also to quality. The number of places where specialists are trained using GIS technology is growing; Western systems are being Russified and Ukrainized, expanding the circle of potential GIS users. Thus, there is a tendency for the qualitative development of digital cartography in the wake of the general development of GIS technology.

Let's consider some features of digital mapping technology and the main parameters of digital maps. First of all, it should be noted that due to the variety of problems solved with the help of digital maps, it is difficult to unambiguously determine universal criteria for their quality, therefore the most general criterion should be the ability to provide a solution to the given problem. The current situation in the digital map market is such that they are mainly created for a specific project, in contrast to traditional cartography, where existing cartographic materials are used as a map base. Therefore, most often the creation of a digital map is determined not by established and time-tested instructions, but by scattered and not always professionally drawn up technical specifications.

Digital map quality

The quality of a digital map consists of a number of components, but the main ones are information content, accuracy, completeness and correctness of the internal structure.

Information content. A map as a model of reality has epistemological properties, for example, such as meaningful correspondence (scientific-based display of the main features of reality), abstractness (generalization, transition from individual concepts to collective ones, selection of typical characteristics of objects and elimination of secondary ones), spatial-temporal similarity (geometric similarity of sizes and shapes, temporal similarity and similarity of relationships, connections, subordination of objects), selectivity and syntheticity (separate representation of jointly manifested phenomena and factors, as well as a single holistic image of phenomena and processes that appear separately in real conditions). These properties, naturally, affect the quality of the final product - a digital map, but mainly fall within the competence of the creators of the original cartographic work: the creators of a traditional source map are responsible for its information content, and when creating a digital map, it is important to correctly select this source and correctly convey , taking into account the features of digital mapping and the information contained in the original map.

Completeness Content transfers. The value of this parameter depends mainly on the technology for creating a digital map, i.e., on how strictly the operators control access to digital objects. For control, a hard copy of a digital map printed on plastic in the scale of the original can be used. When the digital map is subsequently applied to the source, the contents of the digital map and the source material are verified. This method can also be used to assess the quality of the transfer of object shapes, but it is unacceptable for assessing the error in the position of contours, since the output device always produces noticeable distortions. When vectorizing a raster, combining the layers of the created digital map and the raster background allows you to quickly identify missed objects.

Accuracy. The concept of accuracy of a digital map includes such parameters as the error in the position of the contours relative to the source, the accuracy of the transmission of the sizes and shapes of objects during digitization, as well as the error in the position of the contours of the digital map relative to the terrain associated with the source of digital mapping (paper deformation, raster image distortion during scanning and etc.). Additionally, accuracy depends on the software, hardware used, and digitization source. At the moment, two map digitization technologies exist in parallel and complement each other - digitizer input and raster digitization (scanning). Practice shows that it is now difficult to talk about the advantage of any one of them. During digitizer digitization, the bulk of work on entering digital maps is performed by the operator in manual mode, i.e., to enter an object, the operator moves the cursor over each selected point and presses a button. The accuracy of the input during digitization depends critically on the skill of the operator. When vectorizing raster maps, subjective factors influence less, since the raster substrate allows you to constantly correct the input, however, the transmission of the shape of objects is affected by the quality of the raster and when the edges of the raster line are cut, bends in the drawn vector line begin to appear, which are caused not by the general shape of the line, but by local disturbances raster.

Correctness of internal structure.

The finished digital map must have the correct internal structure, determined by the requirements for cards of this type. For example, the core of the cartographic subsystem in GIS using digital vector maps is a multilayer structure of maps (layers), over which end-to-end search and overlay operations must be performed to create derivative digital maps and preserve the connection between object identifiers of the original and derived maps. To support these operations, the topological structure of digital maps in GIS requires requirements that are much more stringent than, for example, maps that are used to solve automated mapping or navigation problems. This is due to the fact that the contours of objects from different maps (layers) must be strictly consistent, although in practice, despite the fairly accurate digitization of the source maps separately, this coordination is not achieved, and when digital maps are superimposed, false polygons and arcs are formed. Discrepancies may be visually indistinguishable up to a certain magnification scale, which is quite acceptable for automated mapping tasks aimed at creating traditional fixed-scale maps using a computer. However, this is completely unacceptable for the functioning of GIS, when strict mathematical apparatus is used to solve various analysis problems. For example, a topological map must have a correct linear-nodal (polygons must be assembled from arcs, arcs must be connected at nodes, etc.) and multilayer structure (the corresponding boundaries from different layers coincide, arcs of one layer are precisely adjacent to objects of another, etc. .d). Creating the correct structure of a digital map depends on the capabilities of the software and the digitalization technology.

Currently, a whole digital mapping industry has already formed in the world, and an extensive market for digital maps and atlases has developed. The first successful commercial project here, apparently, should be considered the Digital Atlas of the World (manufactured by Delorme Mapping Systems), released in 1988. This was followed by the British Domesday Project /100/, as a result of which a digital atlas of Great Britain was created on optical discs (military topographic survey materials were used as source maps and topographical bases). Since 1992, the Cartographic Agency of the US Department of Defense has been producing and updating a digital map of the world (Digital Chart of the World - DCW) at a scale of 1:1,000,000. National digital atlases and general geographic maps have already been created in many countries around the world. In Fig. Figure 5.1 shows a black and white printout of one of the fragments of the digital atlas of the world.

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"...Digital cartography: a section of cartography covering the theory and practice of creating and using digital cartographic products..."

Source:

"GOST 28441-99. Digital cartography. Terms and definitions"

(put into effect by Decree of the State Standard of the Russian Federation dated October 23, 1999 N 423-st)

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  Historical Dictionary of Gallicisms of the Russian Language

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