Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are environments for acquiring, processing and sharing geospatial-data. Today, the main access to map information is through the Internet and in this way map information become more easily accessible and available to users. The advent of web mapping can be considered as the major new trend in cartography. Previously, cartography was restricted to a few companies, institutes and mapping agencies, requiring expensive and complex hard- and software as well as skilled cartographers and geomatics engineers. The cheap and easy transfer of geo-data across the internet allows the integration of distributed data sources, opening opportunities. Everyone with minimal know-how and infrastructure can become a geo-data provider. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage: while it allows everyone to produce maps and considerably enlarges the audience but it also increases errors and lack in the available map information due to the insufficient knowledge of cartographic and geographic principles and may introduce flaws during the preparation, analysis and presentation of geographic and cartographic data. While “web mapper” primarily deals with technological issues, the cartographer additionally studies theoretic aspects: the use of web maps, the evaluation and optimization of techniques and workflows, the usability of web maps, social aspects, and more. Because of this he plays a key role and has multiple functions, such as supervisor on the geographic analysis and cartographic methods and principles. The purpose of this paper is to provide information on the new opportunities and challenges offered by the web technologies for cartography and related geosciences. It describes the developments, changes and prospects of the mapping discipline in the framework of the web development, in fact as the number of geospatial services increased rapidly, an immediate need of rigorous methodologies of data mining and of quality assessment is grown up. In particular the web-GIS applications allow the geo-data distribution in internet and intranet exploiting the spatial analysis and maps performed in desktop GIS software. We can summarize the Web-GIS workflow following these three steps: i) user sends (trough a dedicated web interface) a request in which is defined the area of interest and the data required, ii) based on the received request the Web-GIS engine search in his archive the information (file, image, ODBC, OGC Web-Service) and returns the specified part of territory, iii) one or more images are generated and sent to user-client. Four are the main technological components of the system: the Geo-Data, the web-server, the map server and a client interface. A new interesting new development in Geo-Information is the Collaborative maps where various people collaborate to create and improve maps on the Web. This systems may have a great potential however many technical (simultaneous editing across the web of geographic features) and methodological problems may occur; the possibility to allow to a huge number of user to manipulate data can’t require a minimal quality check, before data goes public. This involves different aspect in order to improve the quality of geographic information on the web.

“Web-GIS” e “web-mapping”:Aspetti tecnici per una cartografia partecipata.

PRANDI, FEDERICO;FASSI, FRANCESCO
2010-01-01

Abstract

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are environments for acquiring, processing and sharing geospatial-data. Today, the main access to map information is through the Internet and in this way map information become more easily accessible and available to users. The advent of web mapping can be considered as the major new trend in cartography. Previously, cartography was restricted to a few companies, institutes and mapping agencies, requiring expensive and complex hard- and software as well as skilled cartographers and geomatics engineers. The cheap and easy transfer of geo-data across the internet allows the integration of distributed data sources, opening opportunities. Everyone with minimal know-how and infrastructure can become a geo-data provider. This can be both an advantage and a disadvantage: while it allows everyone to produce maps and considerably enlarges the audience but it also increases errors and lack in the available map information due to the insufficient knowledge of cartographic and geographic principles and may introduce flaws during the preparation, analysis and presentation of geographic and cartographic data. While “web mapper” primarily deals with technological issues, the cartographer additionally studies theoretic aspects: the use of web maps, the evaluation and optimization of techniques and workflows, the usability of web maps, social aspects, and more. Because of this he plays a key role and has multiple functions, such as supervisor on the geographic analysis and cartographic methods and principles. The purpose of this paper is to provide information on the new opportunities and challenges offered by the web technologies for cartography and related geosciences. It describes the developments, changes and prospects of the mapping discipline in the framework of the web development, in fact as the number of geospatial services increased rapidly, an immediate need of rigorous methodologies of data mining and of quality assessment is grown up. In particular the web-GIS applications allow the geo-data distribution in internet and intranet exploiting the spatial analysis and maps performed in desktop GIS software. We can summarize the Web-GIS workflow following these three steps: i) user sends (trough a dedicated web interface) a request in which is defined the area of interest and the data required, ii) based on the received request the Web-GIS engine search in his archive the information (file, image, ODBC, OGC Web-Service) and returns the specified part of territory, iii) one or more images are generated and sent to user-client. Four are the main technological components of the system: the Geo-Data, the web-server, the map server and a client interface. A new interesting new development in Geo-Information is the Collaborative maps where various people collaborate to create and improve maps on the Web. This systems may have a great potential however many technical (simultaneous editing across the web of geographic features) and methodological problems may occur; the possibility to allow to a huge number of user to manipulate data can’t require a minimal quality check, before data goes public. This involves different aspect in order to improve the quality of geographic information on the web.
2010
Le sfide cartografiche .Movimento partecipazione rischio
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11311/579466
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