Web cartography with open standards - A solution to cartographic challenges of environmental management

The visualization of spatial information in the form of maps is a critical task to facilitate decision making in environmental management. Web Map Services (WMS), Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD) and Symbology Encoding (SE) already created an open framework for Web mapping services. However, from the cartographic point of view, the OGC standards have several limitations for producing high quality cartographic representations. Fortunately, these standards can be cartographically enriched to fulfil the complex visualization requirements coming from environmental management. A solution to creating cartographic visualizations based on open standards was developed in the frame of two major European projects, namely ORCHESTRA (Open Architecture and Spatial Data Infrastructure for Risk Management) and SANY (Sensors Anywhere). For example, the IST - 6th Framework Integrated Project SANY, focuses on interoperability of in situ sensors and sensor networks. In this context, sensors serve as an extreme illustration for the dynamic nature of spatial information that must be represented in the form of maps. The cartographic extensions for the Symbology Encoding (SE) standards allow expressing cartographic rules with spatial operators and advanced feature filtering for layer masking, flexible point symbolization, and patterns and gradients for all spatial features. Furthermore the critical point of creating thematic maps is also solved with extensions for intuitive choropleth and various diagram types generation. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.