Acquisition of Procedural Cartographic Knowledge by Reverse Engineering

Abstract

Successful implementation of an intelligent system for automated map generalization requires formalization of cartographic principles that are, in many cases, only intuitively understood. Formalizing these principles requires acquisition and re-expression in the form of semantic nets, frames, production rules, or similar formalization methods. The various techniques for cartographic knowledge acquisition have been discussed on a theoretical basis; however, little empirical research has been conducted. This paper reports on empirical acquisition of cartographic knowledge by reverse engineering; that is, on trying to recapitulate decisions made on published documents or maps. The work is based on a computer-assisted multi-scale inventory of the Austrian National Topographic Map Series. Queries of the relational database, within which inventory data are stored, lead to the formulation of prototype production rules for modifying map symbols during automatic scale changes. Components of map generalization expr...