Digital Atlas of Poland
Institute of Geography, Polish Academy of Sciences
Features
- Maps, data and software boundled in a single, Windows-based, easy to use package
- Wide choice of thematic maps, covering all aspects of environment and social and economic life of Poland
- 1: 250 000 to 1:500 000 base map, coupled with an extensive name index
Personnel
- Staff from Department of Cartography and Geographic Information Systems, IGiPZ, including:
- Prof. Andrzej Gawryszewski: head of project
- Wojciech Pomianowski: principal editor
- Contributors from IGiPZ
- External contributors
The way of doing
The easiest way to proceed would be to "go multimedia" and arrive at yet another
mass-market product with miserable cartographic quality.
Instead, we choosed the "GIS way" for two main reasons:
1) to be true with geographic reality and
2) to save our efforts in the future.
We shall rely almost exclusively on AVISO GIS technology throughout the project. This really means two things:
Single piece of software for two purposes assures lower costs and immediate 100% data/map compatibility. Additionaly, our home-brewn technology may be stretched and bent to the needs that may not be apparent at the beginning of the project.
Software (DAP Application)
The whole operation of DAP will be centered around the principal software unit (called DAP Application) running under Windows.
The application functions may be outlined as follows:
- Organizing the contents of DAP into hierarhical menu with thematic groups, themes and maps.
- Providing an alternative access to data and maps with metadata dictionary
- Simultaneous display of many maps according to user choice.
- Tabular display of raw data related to map.
- Providing an accessory window with textual information related to map.
- Point-and-click query of geographic objects on map (with table tracking)
- Reverse (table->map) querying
- Stepless scaling and zooming to arbitrary area.
- Map contents adjustment: 1) automatic (according to scale), 2) manual (according to user preferences).
A number of GIS procedures necessary to perform these functions are already implemented in AVISO GIS. Common data format and map model used in AVISO and DAP gives us extra scheduling flexibility: digitizing and map editing can be started a way ahead of software design and coding.
GIS challenges
To combine GIS technology with the requirements of non-professional end-user,
we must pay special attention to several issues:
- Synthetic visualisation
- Intelligent metadata dictionary for easy navigation in vast "variable space"
- Nice solution to the problem of label placing
- Protection of the data from unauthorized use
Base map
The base map will carry the main load of topographic information and will serve
browsing, orientation and map-query purposes.
It's proper contents will be equivalent to traditional 1:500.000 scale map,
however screen display without the loss of cartographic quality should be possible
down to about 1:250.000.
The following layers will be available:
- cities, towns and villages
- administrative units: voivodships, counties and municipalities
- road and railway network
- elevation: contour lines, height points
- hydrography: rivers, ditches, lakes, marsh areas
- land cover: forests and built-up areas within towns
- nature protection areas
Proper GIS approach used in DAP addresses two traditional cartographic challenges: gazeteer and map-querying. All geographic objects will have recorded their location, name and other properties. Thus, these capabilities will be inherently built into DAP - the matter is only to provide a convenient user interface.
The base map will be prepared before thematic maps and its contents will be a "spatial reference" for digitalization of other layers. The aim is to maintain full locational conformity of various types of geographic objects.
