Abstract
It would be a mistake to see map generalisation merely as the automation of a set of cartographic practices. The process of representing various geographies at different levels of detail goes to the heart of geographical understanding. Comprehension and context comes from being able to examine information at multiple levels of detail. An automated environment that can support such interaction depends upon a rich understanding of the qualities, behaviours and relationships among the various geographic phenomena that are being mapped. In this chapter we seek to explore the complexity of map generalisation, reflecting on the impact of the changing ways in which we gather and interact with geographic information. This in turn provides a justification for the structure of the book which is then summarised in the second half of this chapter.
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Notes
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Gestaltism is the idea that the human eye sees a collection of objects in their entirety before perceiving their individual parts.
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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Mackaness, W., Burghardt, D., Duchêne, C. (2014). Map Generalisation: Fundamental to the Modelling and Understanding of Geographic Space. In: Burghardt, D., Duchêne, C., Mackaness, W. (eds) Abstracting Geographic Information in a Data Rich World. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00203-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00203-3_1
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