SketchMapia: Qualitative Representations for the Alignment of Sketch and Metric Maps

Schwering, Angela; Wang, Jia; Chipofya, Malumbo; Jan, Sahib; Li, Rui; Broelemann, Klaus

Abstract

More and more private citizens collect and publish environmental data via web-based geographic information systems. These systems face two challenges: the user interface must be intuitive and the processing of geographic information must account for cognitive impacts. We propose to use sketch maps as the medium for interaction, because they reflect a person's spatial knowledge. Information from sketch maps is distorted, schematized, incomplete, and generalized while metric maps are not. This paper employs qualitative representations for the alignment of sketch and metric maps. We suggest a set of cognitively oriented aspects in sketch maps stably computed by people and evaluate qualitative representations to formalize these aspects. This allows us to align and integrate geographic information from sketch maps.