Geospatial big data and cartography: research challenges and opportunities for making maps that matter

ABSTRACT

Geospatial big data present a new set of challenges and opportunities for cartographic researchers in technical, methodological and artistic realms. New computational and technical paradigms for cartography are accompanying the rise of geospatial big data. Additionally, the art and science of cartography needs to focus its contemporary efforts on work that connects to outside disciplines and is grounded in problems that are important to humankind and its sustainability. Following the development of position papers and a collaborative workshop to craft consensus around key topics, this article presents a new cartographic research agenda focused on making maps that matter using geospatial big data. This agenda provides both long-term challenges that require significant attention and short-term opportunities that we believe could be addressed in more concentrated studies.

RÉSUMÉ

Les Big Data géospatialisées représentent un nouvel ensemble de défis et d’opportunités pour les chercheurs en cartographie dans les domaines technique, méthodologique et artistique. Les nouveaux paradigmes informatiques et techniques en cartographie suivent la progression des big data géospatiales. De plus, les composantes artistiques et scientifiques de la cartographie doivent actuellement concentrer leurs efforts sur les travaux de mise en relation avec d’autres disciplines et se fondent sur des problèmes qui sont importants pour l’humanité et sa durabilité. A partir de papiers de position et d’un atelier collaboratif pour élaborer un consensus sur des sujets clés, ce papier présente un nouvel agenda de recherche en cartographie centré sur la fabrication de cartes qui comptent pour la société, conçues à partir de Big Data géospatiales. Cet agenda propose non seulement des défis à long terme qui requièrent une attention particulière mais aussi des opportunités à court terme qui, à notre avis, pourraient être traitées par des recherches spécifiques.

KEYWORDS:

• Big data
• cartography
• geovisualization
• visual analytics
• research agenda

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Alan MacEachren and Gennady Andrienko for their feedback on an early version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Dr Anthony C. Robinson is Assistant Professor, Director for Online Geospatial Education programmes and Assistant Director for the GeoVISTA research centre in the Department of Geography at Penn State University. Dr Robinson's research focuses on the science of interface and interaction design for geographic visualization software tools. He currently serves as the Chair of the Commission on Visual Analytics for the International Cartographic Association.

Dr Urška Demšar is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Geoinformatics in the School of Geography & Sustainable Development, University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK. She has a Ph.D. in Geoinformatics from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden, and a background in Applied Mathematics from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her research interests are in spatio-temporal visual analytics and in particular in visualization and analysis of movement – a topic on which she is collaborating with movement researchers from other disciplines (movement ecologists and human–computer interaction specialists). For more information, refer http://udemsar.com, @udemsar.

Antoni B. Moore is an associate professor in Geographical Information Science at the National School of Surveying, University of Otago, NZ. He has a BSc(Hons) in Geographical Science (Portsmouth), an MSc in GIS (Leicester) and a PhD (on the application of spatial artificial intelligence to integrated coastal zone management, Plymouth). He currently researches in the areas of geovisualization, cartography and spatial analysis, with specific emphasis on art and maps, also representation of spatiotemporal data.

Dr Aileen Buckley has been a research cartographer with Esri since 2003 and a professional cartographer for almost 30 years. Dr Buckley has published and lectured widely on topics relating to cartography and GIS. In addition, she is the author of the Atlas of Oregon (2001) and the last three editions of Map use: Reading, analysis, interpretation (2009, 2012 and 2016).

Dr Bin Jiang is Professor in Computational Geography at the University of Gävle, Sweden. His research interests centre on geospatial analysis of urban structure and dynamics, for example, topological analysis, scaling hierarchy and agent-based modelling applied to buildings, streets and cities, or geospatial big data in general. He developed Axwoman for topological analysis, and head/tail breaks for scaling analysis. Inspired by Christopher Alexander's work, he developed a mathematical model of beauty – beautimeter, which helps address not only why a design is beautiful, but also how much beauty the design has.

Kenneth Field has over 25 years of experience in cartography as an academic and now at Esri Inc. He holds a BSc in Cartography and a PhD in GIS and is widely published, makes maps and regularly presents on map design. A former Editor of The Cartographic Journal, he is current Chair of the ICA Commission on Map Design. Often opinionated; always passionate researcher, teacher, writer, presenter, blogger and tweeter.

Menno-Jan Kraak is a professor in Geovisual Analytics and Cartography at the University of Twente, ITC. Currently he is head of ITC’s Geo-Information Processing Department. He has written more than 200 publications on cartography and GIS. He is a member of the editorial board of several international journals in the field of Cartography and GIScience, and currently serves as the President of the International Cartographic Association.

Dr Silvana P. Camboim is a faculty member at the Department of Geomatics at the Federal University of Paraná – UFPR, Brazil. She serves as the Chair of the Commission of Open Source Geospatial Technologies for the International Cartographic Association. She is the co-chair of ‘Geo for All’ in South America. Dr Camboim has a focused on research in Geospatial Science, Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) and Geographic Information (GI) standards. Before joining UFPR, Dr Camboim held a position at the Brazilian National Mapping Agency.

Claudia R. Sluter is Full Professor at Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Brazil, where she teaches and researches on the following subjects: geovisualization, thematic mapping, cartographic generalization, topographic mapping, interactive map designs and GIS. She holds a bachelor degree in Cartographic Engineering (1986) and a master’s in Geodetic Science (1993) from UFPR, and earned a doctorate in Computer Science (2000) from National Institute for Space Research, Brazil. During her doctorate, she has studied for one year at Geography Department of the University of Kansas (1998) as a sandwich doctorate.

ORCID

Anthony C. Robinson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5249-8010

Urška Demšar http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7791-2807

Kenneth Field http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0423-7892

Menno-Jan Kraak http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8605-0484