DEVELOPMENT OF A GRAPHIC LOGIC CHECK TOOL FOR SVG MAPS

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SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), which has been developed in W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), is expected to be a new standard for XML-based graphics descriptions. In the near future, many maps on the Internet will be formatted as SVG. SVG-formatted maps are relatively easily understood by machines because of their internal design structures, compared with image-formatted maps that have been mainly used as graphics on the Web. This paper introduces basic principles of our proposed tool called map checker for checking SVG maps using the knowledge of cartography. The map checker for SVG maps may become something similar to spelling and grammar checkers for text documents. It may help people create better maps to be published on the Internet, and learn cartography and graphic design through the process of improving maps.Maps should communicate the logic of graphic relations represented in the maps with viewers. The graphic relations used in our research are based on visual variables proposed by Jacques Bertin. Many maps on the Internet include inappropriate or wrong graphic relations for visual communication. These bad maps on the Internet are generated through current GIS (Geographic Information Systems), or created by people using some drawing software. Present GIS people have a tendency to think that the geographic databases are essential and maps are only temporal views generated from the databases. As a result, GIS people tend to forget the importance of visual communication, and they are producing poor geographic databases with less imagination, due to a lack of experience in creating effective visual communication. Our proposed map checker will be useful not only for ordinary on-line map creators but for GIS people to improve maps as views of geographic databases, and to learn how important the visual communication is for producing sophisticated geographic databases.