Development of a digitalization tool for linking thematic data to a background map

Sammanfattning: Cartographic mashups present geographic data from various sources. A typical example is adding thematic data on top of a multi-scales background map. Currently, thematic data and multi-scales background data are not linked together in cartographic mashups which may have potential problems such as inconsistency of scale ranges. However, in some cases, thematic data and background data have some identical geometries. By creating linkage via these common parts, thematic data can be linked to background map. The Sematic Web is a Web 3.0 technology through standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It provides techniques that enable people to create and link data in standard data formats by semantically describing interrelations of datasets. The linked data can be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries. This study develops a digitalization tool to create and link thematic data to background data in a cartographic mashup. The tool provides two ways to create geometries of thematic data: (1) using common geometries from background map and (2) generating new geometries. Then, thematic data are linked to background data by applying the Semantic Web technologies in the tool. After implementation of the digitalization tool, it is used to create and link thematic data to background map in a use case. Finally, the tool is evaluated against some predefined requirement specifications. It turns out that the digitalization tool manages to create and link thematic data with a background map. With the digitalization tool developed in this study, thematic data are linked to background map which contributes to synchronize scale ranges between two datasets. It also benefits the real-time data integration of multi-scale data in cartographic mashups.