1. Cartographic Design for Screen Maps

Introduction

For this lesson we assume that the theory of Cartography Basics and Thematic Cartography is known! The following link guides you to the lectures for those theories: Institute of Cartography
Nevertheless, in some chapters we repeat some basic theory for the sake of completeness. You are not obliged to read these chapter when you already know the subject of some chapters.

The production of a paper map and a display map differs significantly. As you saw in the lesson Planning Multimedia Projects there exist a couple of hardware and software problems that have to be considered during the development and the production of a multimedia application. In this lesson, we will resume the facts that the output medium is the display and that we cannot change its size significantly (besides buying a bigger screen...). We will show you some possibilities how to solve this problem.

Because we always have the intention to produce a good cartographic product, we have to apply a few cartographic representation rules for screen maps. In this lesson we introduce you these rules.

In this lesson we look at two different map types, topographic and thematic. Depending on these map types, the display troubles that may occur are bigger or not. We will give you a short overview of thematic and topographic maps in general and introduce you the represenation rules that have to be followed for each map type. Since the subject of this module is "Multimedia Cartography" we also introduce interactive tools that may be implemented in the two map types.

The next example shows an interactive thematic map. It exemplifies the implementation of interactivity in a display map. You do not have to learn something from this example, just explore and enjoy it. (Move mouse over the diagrams.)