Cartographic Production Aide

Inga Myronova

The Cartographic Production Aide is an ArcMap add-in developed to aid a GIS Analyst throughout the production of professional cartographic products. The principal objective of the Cartographic Production Aide is to develop a standard and simple workflow for map production in ArcGIS environment which focusing on industry standards and map design. The add-in consists of a toolbar and a dockable window, giving the analyst options to quickly format the layout view, add common map elements, add data from arcgis.com layer packages instantly and export the final product in PDF or JPEG format. This toolset will save a GIS Analyst an immeasurable amount of time and effort when efficiency, speed and quality are imperative. The tool was written in VB .Net using Visual Studio 2010 integrated development environment (IDE) with the ESRI ArcObjects 10.0 software development kit (SDK) for .NET. Once the Cartographic Production Aide add-in has been installed, the toolbar should load automatically the next time ArcMap opens or will be accessible in the toolbars list. The toolbar contains four buttons: Export PDF (button) Export JPEG (button) Layout View Options (button) Create Point (tool) The Export PDF and Export JPEG buttons make it effortless to produce a map document or image without having to navigate through menus and various settings. Both buttons produce an output containing the Active View of that instance, providing extra flexibility for the user. In the case where a map is not required, if the analyst clicks either of the buttons while in the Data View, the output will be just the visible extent of the active Data Frame. In the case the user is in the Layout View, the output will be the extent of the page and can consist of multiple data frames. The Layout View Options button provides access to the dockable window which contains various options to assist the user when generating a map. Primary responsibilities of a GIS Analyst are to acquire, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present spatial data. To successfully deliver products to clients, the analyst is required to have strong technical and analytical skills. Left brain dominant people usually excel in in this type of professions, being more adept at logic, calculation and enjoying technical environments. Although the presentation of analysis and derived conclusions may seem simple these activities are usually of least interest to left brain dominant individuals and will generally lack in the effective communication and presentation of their inferences to their audience.

GIS Analysis Workflow

May 16, 2012 GISC 6382

Cartographic Production Aide

Inga Myronova

Geographic Visualization entails the use of various techniques and design approaches to effectively transform and communicate geographic data into a form that will be easily understood by the target audience. Right brain dominant individuals usually excel in this phase of analysis. Because they are very creative and experimental, emphasize color and other visual effects, have an ability to brake problems down and reconstruct them into eye-pleasing workflows, they are able to communicate and deliver information to more effectively to a larger audience. Thus, the ability to deliver information clearly and effectively increases the value of information and transforms it from information (data and numbers) to an asset, making it intelligence clients can utilize. By creating a simple workflow this tool streamlines the cartographic production and presentation process, assisting the analyst to deliver a visually enhanced product. The workflow consists of steps that are very appealing to left brain dominant individuals, yet, are creative to relate to right brain dominant personalities too. The dockable window provides an all-in-one easily accessible platform to completely format the map and transform the information into intelligence. By eliminating the need to navigate through numerous menus and toolbars within ArcMap when adding the required map elements, this tool will also save the analyst a considerable amount of time. Within the dockable window, the user is provided with a dropdown list Add Data of common data layers to be quickly and easily added to the map. These layers require minimal effort to add and they are immediately retrieved from arcgis.com. The layer package is downloaded to their local hard drive and added to the Table of Contents (TOC). This list could be easily customized depending what type of data the analyst uses most often and instead of being located on arcgis.com the layers can be located on a GIS server as shapefiles, geodatabase feature classes, SDE feature classes, WMSs, or ArcGIS Server REST services as well. The USGS National Hazards and Weather Warnings layers are also available, providing near-real time USGS services updated every 10-15 minutes. The Create Point button is the fourth button located on the toolbar and is an ArcMap add-in tool. This tool provides the analyst with the ability to create a one point shapefile by simply clicking a location in the data view and the shapefile layer is then automatically added TOC. To create the shapefile, the mouse cursor coordinates in map units are first written to a simple 2 row text (.txt) file, containing two fields, one for the x-coordinate and one for the y-coordinate. The values in the fields may represent any coordinate system and units such as latitude and longitude or meters, which are defined by the active dataframe. The coordinate System of the active data frame is used to create the spatial reference and the point is projected on the fly. The first row represents a header to identify the x, y coordinates and second row represents the x, y coordinates in map units. This text file is then retrieved by the geoprocessor, brought into ArcMap and converted to an x, y event layer using the data management tool. Since the x, y event layer does not have an Object ID field, we are unable to perform certain analysis that may be required so, the next step is using the conversion tools to convert the temporary x, y event layer to a permanent shapefile that contains one point location and then is added to the TOC. This process is accomplished by creating a geoprocessor object and instantiating IDispatch. The IDispatch interface exposes objects, methods, and properties to programming tools and other applications that support Automation. COM components implement the IDispatch interface to enable access by Automation clients, such as Python, VBScript, and Jscript.

May 16, 2012 GISC 6382

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Cartographic Production Aide

Inga Myronova

In addition to the functions discussed the dockable window also includes options to change map size, orientation and map back ground color (this can be used to represent land or water bodies that are not the focus of the analysis). With a click of one button the user can also add the legend, north arrow, and scale bar to the map. Text elements that can also be easily added and customized with font, size and color within the dockable window; text elements include paragraph text, map title and author, date, coordinate system, source and a few other opinion. Maps are a very important source of information and effect the way people view and understand the world. Maps have the ability to influence peoples believes and values, making it crucial to produce maps that are highly accurate and effectively communicate their message to the general public or their target audience. The Cartographic Production Aid will be able to drastically reduce the time required by the GIS Analyst to produce a geo-visually enhanced cartographic product that clearly communicates its message and making this information of value to the client. References:
ArcObjects SDK 10 Microsoft .NET Framework, ArcGIS Resource Center, http://help.arcgis.com/en/sdk/10.0/arcobjects_net/conceptualhelp/index.html. Avelar, Silvania et al.On the Design of Schematic Transport Maps. Cartographica; Fall2006, Vol. 41 Issue 3, p217-228. Bernhard Jenny, Ernst Hutzler, and Lorenz Hurni. Self-Adjusting Legends for Proportional Symbol Maps. Cartographica; Winter2009, Vol. 44 Issue 4, p301-304. Crampton, Jeremy W. Cartography A Field in Tension? Cartographica; Spring2009, Vol. 44 Issue 1, p1-3. Foody, Giles M. Map comparison in GIS. Progress in Physical Geography; Aug2007, Vol. 31 Issue 4, p439-445. Framework for Mapping Features from Landsat 7 Imagery. School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems. Geoprocessing: Automating your work with scripts. ESRI. November 17, 2006. Hugo Carro1, et al. MapGen Automated Generalisation for Thematic Cartography. National Centre for Geographic Information (CNIG). Kang-Tsung Changg, Programming ArcObjects with VBA A Task-Oriented Approach, CRC Press Second Edition 2008. Lloyd, Robert et al. Technology and Map-Learning: Users, Methods, and Symbols. Annals of the Association of American Geographers; Dec2003, Vol. 93 Issue 4, p828-850. Matty, Jane M. GIS Data Made Available. Rocks & Minerals; May/Jun2003, Vol. 78 Issue 3, p153. Map production, International Cartographic association, last modified 30 January 2012, http://icaci.org/researchagenda/map-production/. Phillips, Anna Lena. Making Better Maps of Food Deserts. American Scientist; May/Jun2011, Vol. 99 Issue 3, p209-210. Roush, Wade. Killer Maps. Technology Review; Oct2005, Vol. 108 Issue 10, p54-60, 6p. Rd, Jan Ketil. An agenda for democratising cartographic visualisation. Norwegian Journal of Geography; Mar2001, Vol. 55 Issue 1, p38-41. Sui, Daniel Z. GIS, Cartography, and the Third Culture: Geographic Imaginations in the Computer Age. Professional Geographer; Feb2004, Vol. 56 Issue 1, p62-72. Sharon Kazemi, Linlin Ge and Samsung Lim. An Interactive Segmentation and Generalization Sara Irina Fabrikant, Stacy Rebich Hespanha, and Mary Hegarty. Cognitively Inspired and Perceptually Salient Graphic Displays for Efficient Spatial Inference Making. Annals of the Association of American Geographers; Jan2010, Vol. 100 Issue 1, p13-29, 17p, 3 Graphs, 8 Maps. Virrantaus, Kirsi, et al. ICA Research Agenda on Cartography and Geographic Information Science. Cartographica; Spring2009, Vol. 44 Issue 1, p45-55.

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