Toward a Conceptual Framework for the Cartographic Visualization of Network Information

A large quantity of data that describes the geometry and attributes of network infrastructures is already accumulated on a regular basis and is readily available in digital formats but is often not used to its fullest potential.

Abstract

Geographic information systems (GIS) are now widely used to manage and visualize transportation and other network information and to plan for changes in network infrastructure. As GIS technology becomes more portable and as planning styles evolve, these network data and derived analyses will be presented, sometimes interactively, not only to professional analysts but also to a wider audience of administrators, planners, and the general public. Such presentations require the effective communication of a combination of static and dynamic attributes of complex spatial networks to a diverse audience for a variety of purposes. A large quantity of data that describes the geometry and attributes of network infrastructures is already accumulated on a regular basis and is readily available in digital formats. Like most raw data, however, this massive digital resource is often not used to its fullest potential because methods for rendering it and synthesizing it for visual display are not well developed or implemented within standard GIS software. In this paper we develop a framework in which the formal functions of networks are tied to the information that must be communicated given a set of demands that influence the choice of a basic representational strategy.