The World in Your Pocket - Towards a Mobile Cartography

The dawn of new technologies on the horizon, such as telecommunication, mobile internet, and handheld computing devices, offers new chances to the discipline of cartography. However, existing approaches to mobile cartography mostly have a commercial background and are rather technology centred. This quite narrow view ignores many relevant problems and does not fully profit from the new possibilities a mobile cartography could provide. Hence, we will sketch a general conceptual framework for cartography in a mobile environment. After the identification of specific user tasks and requests in a mobile environment suitable models of context and user’s interests or preferences are highlighted. The process of adaptive and dynamic generation of visualisations for mobile users is illustrated and the key research fields involved are pointed out. An example demonstrates the benefits of dynamic visualisation of geoinformation on mobile devices. It should illustrate the basic ideas of mobile cartography and prove the flexibility of vector data (e.g. SVG) as an efficient and useful means of visualisation in a mobile context.