New Method for Positional Cartographic Quality Control in Digital Mapping

Abstract

AbstractQuality control applies to many attributes of a map: completeness, reliability, adherence to symbology specifications, interpretation errors, feature accuracy, and others. This article focuses on a map’s positional accuracy and presents a new method for cartographic quality control applied not just to a single chart, as is usual, but to digital mapping as a whole, generated by a photogrammetric process. The first step is to define the size of the sample using the estimated total number of possible control points in accordance with ISO 2859-1. The second step is to select a set of control points in homogeneous regions defined by a criterion that involves factors such as block adjustment errors, declivity, distance to control points, and operator skills. Then, these control points are surveyed both in a reference and more accurate source and in the cartographic base to be controlled, and the differences between the coordinates of the corresponding points are calculated. Finally, statistical tests ar...