The Internet has brought many changes to the way geographic information is created and shared. One aspect that has not changed is metadata. Static spatial data quality descriptions were standardized in the mid-1990s and cannot accommodate the current climate of data creation where nonexperts are using mobile phones and other location-based devices on a continuous basis to contribute data to Internet mapping platforms. The usability of standard geospatial metadata is being questioned by academics and neogeographers alike. This chapter analyzes current discussions of metadata to demonstrate how the media shift that is occurring has affected requirements for metadata. Two case studies of metadata use are presented-online sharing of environmental information through a regional spatial data infrastructure in the early 2000s, and new types of metadata that are being used today in OpenStreetMap, a map of the world created entirely by volunteers.
Abstract. Automatic generalization of cartographic features has been recognized as a goal of Geographic Information Science (GIScience). Many successful algorithms have been introduced for generalization tasks such as point reduction and smoothing of linear features. Such algorithms operate well as a function of change in map scale or resolution. Other generalization tasks have proved considerably more difficult. Two of these operations, aggregation and dimensional collapse, are trivial to implement -replacing a set of points with an area feature or replacing an area feature with a single point -but have proven challenging to make operational. The decision to aggregate or collapse features is as much dependent on the context of the features as they are change in map scale. This dissertation proposes to show how ontologies can be used to inform automated generalization in these operations.
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