A Study on Empirically Relevant Aspects for Qualitative Alignment of Sketch Maps

Wang, J., Mülligann, C., Schwering, A.

Abstract

Over the past years, user generated content has gained more and more importance in the area of geographic information science. Ordinary citizens collect environmental data of their neighborhoods and publish it via (web-based) spatial information systems. The success of these spatial information systems relies on overcoming two main challenges: the user interface for inserting and querying spatial information must be intuitive to be understood by ordinary citizens and processing spatial information must account for cognitive aspects of geographic space. We propose to use sketch maps as a visual user interface, because sketch maps are intuitive and commonly used in human-to-human communication. Sketch maps have often been used to gather information from humans. They reflect users’ spatial knowledge that is based on observations rather than on measurements. Sketch maps are externalizations of cognitive maps which are typically distorted, schematized, incomplete, and generalized. Therefore, we suggest a new comprehensive qualitative mapping procedure to process spatial information from sketch maps taking into account the typical distortions and schematizations. This will allow us to integrate qualitative and quantitative information from sketch maps, schematic maps and Euclidian metric maps into one single spatial information system.