CREATING INTERACTIVE WEB MAPS FOR THE CITY

Abstract. The current task of cartographic support for geological exploration and the oil and gas industry is to meet the needs for rapid access to spatial data by specialists. The preparation of specialized data for publication in interactive web maps involves a number of technical issues. Some of them are explored in detail in case of a cartographic support for a cameral processing and interpretation of geological, geophysical and other geoscientific data in Andaman deep water basin. The points highlighted here are in fact a reflection of the role of interactive web maps, regardless of the thematic content, in the development of the Real and Virtual maps concept. The experimental work presented in this article illustrates most of the R/V transformations first developed by H. Moellering in early 1980s. Solving the operations for transformations between real maps, interactive maps, initial (raw) thematic data and cartographic databases will help enrich cartography with new methods of creating and using data, expanding and adapting the communicative conception of cartography to modern realities. An example of the web map developed also shows how the cartographer can simplify the work of professionals in other sectors, their communication with each other through the map language and its web representations. The use of web maps in the poorly studied Andaman deep water basin shows how web maps can contribute to the quality implementation of government programs for increasing exploration and the subsequent development of mineral resources.

Today, interactive maps are gaining popularity and are used by both specialists and ordinary users in various fields of science and technology. However, the development of the theoretical base of web cartography and the development of interactive maps lags significantly behind the practical component. Moreover, a systematization of the principles of user-centered design in the field of web mapping is necessary. The aim of this work is to create a methodical framework that can be universal for most interactive web map development projects. The creation of the framework is based on the established scheme of interactive web maps development, the ideas of user-oriented design, as well as on the personal experience of the authors in the development of interactive web maps. The methodical framework covers the following aspects: the need for interactivity of web maps, accessibility on various devices, the dimensional aspect of a map, data structuring, the choice of elements of interaction, the need of usage of third-party maps, multilinguality, the ability to upload user-generated content, the need to create animations, and the choice of the base software. The developed framework helps to form the determining part of the conception of an interactive web map, which is a fundamental step in the proposed process of a web map development. Moreover, the framework facilitates the process of creating interactive web maps and opens up new possibilities and development methods for specialists in web cartography. The authors, using the interactive web map dedicated to the World Heritage Site “Struve Geodetic Arc”, which was developed by them, as an example, clearly demonstrated the conceptual development process based on the methodical framework. The terminology is considered and a new definition of an interactive web map is given.

This paper presents SPOIL (Shifted POI List), a new method to achieve location privacy for map services on smartphones. Using SPOIL, users can query routes from POI (Point of Interests) A to POI B, while not revealing the locations of A and B to the map server. Different from previous works, SPOIL is transparent to existing map services, assume no trusted third party, and more efficient for smartphones. The basic idea is simple: the client (i.e., smartphone) shifts user-intended POIs to some neighboring POIs instead, and query the map server using the shifted POIs. By carefully selecting places for shifting, we ensure: (1) privacy: on observing the route query, it is difficult for an adversary to identify the user-intended endpoints. (2) usability: the returned route is very similar to the intended one, thus giving useful directions for the user; To make SPOIL efficient for smartphones, we let clients retrieve candidate places for shifting from an additional server, instead of storing all the places and computing nearest ones locally. We implement SPOIL as an Android application, and evaluate it with real query traces. Experimental results show that SPOIL strikes a good balance among privacy, usability and efficiency.

PurposeThis article helps secondary teachers use online maps about the COVID-19 pandemic to develop students' critical map literacy and digital geographic information literacy while helping students analyze the pandemic and its impact on society. The purpose of this paper is to discuss unique features of online maps, suggest six questions to bring to online maps, and provide an activity and resources to develop students' skill in using these maps.Design/methodology/approachFor social studies teachers, online interactive maps create opportunities as well as challenges. They can be more engaging and interesting than static maps. They also show the relevance of key themes in geography as well as the power of maps to convey information. Maps about COVID-19 are used to explore themes in geography.FindingsInterpreting COVID-19 online maps can help students learn about the pandemic, evaluate the decisions of health officials and elected leaders, and thus develop tools to participate in society as active citizens.Originality/valueYoung people and adults are often more engaged by interactive online sources; however, online maps require teachers to develop new approaches to teaching basic and critical map literacy that include elements of digital geographic information literacy. Students can learn to ask questions of maps while learning about COVID-19.

The quality of operations that can be interactively performed by users (map functions) is crucially important in the use of interactive Web maps. The concept of map functionality encompasses the capabilities provided to the user, such as viewing, analysis, or integral management of map elements. This chapter presents a framework and Web-based application for research on the functionality of Web maps. Special tools have been designed for the collection of information about users’ preferences in an interactive way. The Web-based application CartoUI (www.cartoui.com) allows users to express their ideas about interactive map functions and map layout by compiling their own Web map prototypes. The chapter also introduces statistics yielded by study of 75 users who had created different prototypes of simple maps. Their preferences were analysed in order to prepare general user-driven requirements for Web maps presented in the paper.

With the continuous development of mobile internet, location-based services are widely used in our daily life. The issue of mobile user privacy disclosure is unavoidable. Attackers can acquire sensitive information such as user identity, privacy and so on, according to the user's location information. To solve the issue, this paper proposed an improved third-party anonymous server framework to protect the mobile user location for KNN (K-nearest neighbor) query. The framework prevents a third-party anonymous server from being attacked and thus compromise of user information. Meanwhile, it allocates part of the computation to mobile devices in order to reduce the possibility of computing performance constraints from the servers. On this basis, a new client POI (point of interest) search algorithm DATwist is put forward, which searches the POIs based on double anchors points. The DATwist algorithm can fix the defects that the POIs are distributed around the anchor points and the search results are unbalanced in the SpaceTwist algorithm, enabling a more accurate and effective KNN progress. Finally, the comparing experiments proved that the DATwist algorithm has more advantages than the HINN (homogeneous incremental nearest neighbor) algorithm in effectiveness and communication overhead with uniform distribution of POIs query results.

This chapter addresses the growing interest in using screen-based maps on the Internet for collaborative planning and design. Specifically, it introduces six prototype web interfaces that invite users to read maps of their community and then make selections and type in comments in order to provide feedback into a planning process. Each of the six prototypes highlights a different tool or feature for navigating or making selections on online maps. New web technology has made it possible to create map-based surveys to receive feedback from the general public, but it is not yet clear what kind of graphic design alternatives and digital map designs and tools are the most useful for novice map-readers. This chapter describes several different interface designs with the purpose of finding which combinations of online tools and maps are most productive in soliciting feedback in a community planning process. The goal is to explore how web-based maps can be advanced beyond mere information provision to actual two-way interaction with the public. Tools such as free-hand drawing may provide new avenues for people to take a greater role in public decisionmaking. Examples are presented of solutions to the basic problems of creating interactive screen-based maps, which include navigating large geographic area maps and making selections on maps.

Although the notion of ‘too many markers’ have been mentioned in several research, in practice, displaying hundreds of Points of Interests (POI) on a web map in two dimensions with an acceptable usability remains a real challenge. Web practitioners often make an excessive use of clustering aggregation to overcome performance bottlenecks without successfully resolving issues of perceived performance. This paper tries to bring a broad awareness by identifying sample issues which describe a general reality of clustering, and provide a pragmatic survey of potential technologies optimisations. At the end, we discuss the usage of technologies and the lack of documented client-server workflows, along with the need to enlarge our vision of the various clutter reduction methods.

Developments in web mapping and web based geographic information systems (GIS) have evolved rapidly over the past two decades. What began as online map images available to a small group of geospatial experts and professionals has developed to a comprehensive and interactive web map based on integrated information from multiple sources and manipulated by masses of users globally. This paper introduces a framework that outlines the eras of web mapping and significant developments among those eras. From this framework, some of the influences and trends can be determined, particularly those in relation to the development of technologies and their relation to the growth in the number and diversity of users and applications that utilise web mapping and geospatial information online.

SUMMARY Quality online maps and mapping resources, while indispensable to library users, can be challenging to locate. The range of available map types continues to expand and includes road maps, historical collections, political and physical atlases as well as maps and images of the moon and certain planets. Interactive mapping sites continue to grow and provide unique opportunities for users to interact with socioeconomic, historic, and physical data while creating unique and personalized maps. This article serves to highlight the best online resources for both map image collections and interactive mapping sites found on the Internet today.

Competition between Points of Interest (POIs) refers to the situation in which two POIs directly or indirectly provide similar services to secure businesses. A large portion of prior studies on competition analysis focuses on mining textual data, e.g., news articles and social comments. However, the increasing availability of human mobility and mobile query data enables a new paradigm for analyzing the competitive relationships among POIs, which remains largely unexplored. To this end, in this paper, we attempt to mine large-scale online map search query data for better understanding POI competitive relationships. Based on a co-query POI graph built from the map search query data, we develop a novel neural graphlet-based prediction framework to predict the competitive relationships among POIs. A unique perspective of our model is to infer latent POI competitive relationships by integrating multiple distinct factors, e.g., graphlet structure, geographical distance, and regional features, reflected in map search query data and POI data. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, and show that our framework outperforms all baselines with a significant margin in all evaluation metrics.

The spread of geobrowsers as tools for displaying geographically referenced information provides insights and opportunities to those who, not being specialists in Geographic Information Systems, want to take advantage from exploration and communication power offered by these software. Through the use of web services such as Google Maps and the use of suitable markup languages, one can create interactive maps starting from highly heterogeneous data and information. These interactive maps can also be easily distributed and shared with Internet users, because they do not need to use proprietary software nor special skills but only a web browser. Unlike the maps created with GIS, whose output usually is a static image, the interactive maps retain all their features to users advantage. This paper describes a web application that, using the Keyhole Markup Language and the free service of Google Maps, produces choropleth maps relating to some forest indicators estimated by the last Italian National Forest Inventory. The creation of a map is done through a simple and intuitive interface. The maps created by users can be downloaded as KML file and can be viewed or modified via the freeware application Google Earth or free and open source GIS software like Quantum GIS. The web application is free and available at www.ricercaforestale.it.

BackgroundThe rates of Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in England have been rising steadily since the mid 1990s, making them a major public health concern. In 2003, 672,718 people were diagnosed with an STD in England, and around one third of those cases were diagnosed in London.ResultsUsing GeoReveal v1.1 for Windows, we produced Web-based interactive choropleth maps of diagnoses of STDs by Primary Care Trust (PCT) in London for the years from 1997 to 2003 . These maps are in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format and require a freely available Adobe SVG browser plug-in to be displayed. They are based on data obtained from the House of Commons Hansard Written Answers for 15 October 2004. They show steadily rising rates of STDs in London over the covered seven-year period. Also, one can clearly see on the maps that PCTs located in central London had the highest numbers of STD diagnoses throughout the mapped seven years. A companion bar chart allows users to instantly compare the STD figure of a given PCT for a given year against the average figure for all 25 mapped PCTs for the same year, and also compare those figures across all seven years. The maps offer users a rich set of useful features and functions, including the ability to change the classification method in use, the number of ranges in the map, and the colour theme, among others.ConclusionsWizard-driven tools like GeoReveal have made it very easy to transform complex raw data into valuable decision support information products (interactive Web maps) in very little time and without requiring much expertise. The resultant interactive maps have the potential of further supporting health planners and decision makers in their planning and management tasks by allowing them to graphically interrogate data, instantly spot trends, and make quick and effective visual comparisons of geographically differentiated phenomena between different geographical areas and over time.SVG makes an ideal format for such maps. SVG is a World Wide Web Consortium non-proprietary, XML-based vector graphics format, and is an extremely powerful alternative to Macromedia® Flash and bitmap graphics.

Abstract. OpenStreetMap (OSM), as a typical volunteered geographic information project, is an online map with free content and everyone can edit and use it (Goodchild 2007). A range of applications has been proposed using OSM data, including routing and navigation, crisis mapping, 3D modelling, land use/cover mapping. This is because the OSM data is not only free of use, but also has a global coverage and high currentness. In despite of the above advantages, however, most of the OSM data were contributed by ‘non-professional’ or ‘amateur geographers’ (Goodchild 2008; Haklay 2010). Therefore, a lot of concerns have been paid attention to the quality issue of the OSM data. Assessing the quality of OSM data has become a hot topic in the field of geographic information science.Extensive studies have been carried out on assessing various quality measures (e.g. positional accuracy, completeness and attribute accuracy) of OSM datasets in different countries or districts such as Germany, England, France, Italy, Canada and the United States. In the meanwhile, the road feature of an OSM dataset has been paid much attention to. To our knowledge, however, not any study has been focused on assessing the data quality of OSM building data in China, although it may be an essential data source for urban planning and management, 3D modelling and indoor navigation. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate the OSM building data in China. More precisely, an analysis of the spatial-temporal evolution and completeness of OSM building data in China from 2012 to 2017 was carried out. The tenet of our study was to employ two quality indicators, i.e. building count (Gröchenig et al. 2013, Barron et al. 2014, Fan 2016) and building density (Zhou 2018), for the analyses. First, the numbers of OSM building data from 2012 to 2017 were calculated in terms of both provincial- and prefecture-level divisions in China; The OSM building count were then compared among different divisions and also different years (2012–2017) for analyzing the evolution of OSM building data in China in both temporal dimension and spatial scale. Moreover, the correlations between OSM building counts and four potential factors (i.e. gross domestic product (GDP), population, urban land area, OSM road length), which may influence the development of OSM building data in China, were respectively investigated. Second, a 1 × 1 km2 regular grid was overlapped onto the OSM building datasets in urban areas for calculating the OSM building density of each grid cell; Moreover, high-density grid cells (whose OSM building data were almost complete) were extracted and analyzed through a simple clustering method, in order to investigate the spatial pattern of OSM building data in urban areas. Results showed that,1) The OSM building data in China increased almost 20 times from the years 2012 to 2017, especially for those located in the eastern coastal regions of China (e.g. the provincial-level divisions: Jinagsu, Zhejiang, Guangzhou and Shandong and the prefecture-level divisions: Beijing, Nantong, Shanghai, Tianjin, Suzhou, Yangzhou and Dalian). In most cases, both the GDP and OSM road length factors had a moderate correlation with the OSM building count. 2) Most of the grid cells in urban areas still had no building or their building densities were equal to 0%, which indicated that the OSM building dataset in China was far from being complete. From analyzing the high density grid cells, two typical spatial distribution modes, i.e. dispersion and aggregation, were found in different prefecture-level divisions. As an example, the high-density grid cells for some prefecture-level divisions (e.g. Luoyang, Yueyang and Dalian) were mostly aggregated in the city cores; while those for some (e.g. Beijing Tianjin and Shanghai) were located in the hot spots such as business districts, attractions and transportation hubs.The above results may benefit for users (especially those researchers and educators) to choose appropriate study area(s) from the OSM building dataset in China. In the meanwhile, the volunteers around the world may be motivated to contribute more OSM building data in this region. Further research work may include: developing quality indicators for quantitative completeness estimation of OSM building data, especially in rural areas; and investigating other quality measures (e.g. positional accuracy and semantic accuracy) or geographical features (e.g. railways, land uses, and points of interest) in China’s OSM dataset.

The propensity for visiting urban parks is affected by the park’s attractiveness and travel convenience, where walking provides the most basic and fair access. Walking routes from residences to parks, in terms of duration and perception, have received insufficient attention in the literature, particularly in the urban form context in China. Using the case study of Xuanwu Lake Park in Nanjing, we acquire walking routes from residences to the park through open-source data scraping in order to depict the pedestrian shed and pedestrian environment reasonably along these routes. The results show that the walking routes vary significantly with regards to distance, turns, street views, and so on. Proximity to urban parks, in terms of Euclidean distance, does not necessarily correspond to actual route distance, which may have a more direct influence on travel convenience and, hence, visiting propensity. Palpable differences in green visual ratio, image elements, and points of interest along these routes may also contribute to pedestrian environmental disparity. Analyzing data obtained from an online map provides a rapid and objective approach to detect pedestrian sheds and diagnose pedestrian environments, which can facilitate urban planners and policy makers in siting new parks and assessing the service capacity of parks.