Mobile cartography

The progresses in the fields of mobile Internet and positioning methods have lead to a plethora of new possibilities for cartography in mobile usage environments. However, principles of web mapping cannot simply be transferred to the mobile environment. Likewise the availability of Location Based Services (LBS) has made it possible to develop mobile map services, yet LBS themselves are mainly driven by technology and only concerned with location-related issues, thus have rather limited meaning for the usability study. This work has introduced a new and comprehensive conceptual framework of mobile cartography, thus established an instrument for the design of useful and usable geovisualisation services. The research enriches and extends cartographic theory and methods in the field of geographic information communication in mobile environments and adaptive methods for cartographic visualisation. It established new concepts for mobile cartography and showed the differences, but also the similarities towards traditional cartography and web cartography. The main focus is on the elaboration of adaptive methods for visualisation of geographic information for mobile usage, i.e. on mobile devices. Adaptation takes place in the components such as the mobile user, his/her activities with associated goals, as well as the situation they are placed in. The usage scenarios described were helpful for the implementation of a rudimentary, prototypical adaptive geovisualisation service for mobile users. The service for the example of point symbol maps was implemented based on open-standard formats and served as a proof of concept. It basically demonstrates how a mobile client can send as Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) encoded context parameters to a web service. The service handles the user demand by sending a request for the required geospatial data and maybe additional filters to a Web Feature Server. The result, a Geography Markup Language (GML) document is transformed through an Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) into a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) document. Further adaptations of the SVG document can be effected by manipulating the Document Object Model (DOM). Finally, the web service returns the result as a SVG map back to the client. A few examples generated with this geovisualisation service demonstrate the potential of map adaptation to mobile user activities.