Developing a Flow Mapping Module in a GIS Environment

作者：Kim Kamyoung^*; Lee Sang Il; Shin Jungyeop; Choi Eunyoung

来源：Cartographic Journal, 2012, 49(2): 164-175.

DOI：10.1179/174327711X13166800242356

• geographical movement
• traditional flow mapping
• Tobler's Flow Mapper
• alternative symbols
• geographic information systems (GIS)

The serious drawback of traditional flow mapping commonly representing geographical movement with straight lines of varying widths is a visual cluttering problem. To resolve these issues, several alternatives reducing the problem or enhancing pattern detection have been suggested. Despite being successful in some aspects, they have their shortcomings such as partial representation or misrepresentation of geographical movement and difficulty in interpreting visualized results. In addition, flow mapping functionality has yet to be fully implemented in modern geographic information systems (GIS) applications. Given these problems, this paper proposes the new designed symbols for improving the traditional flow mapping and develops a flow mapping module implementing them within a commercial GIS software package. Application results demonstrated that the developed module can represent gross, net, two-way and location-specific flows from a single dataset efficiently and can make better flow maps with the alternative symbols. The alternative symbols successfully reduced the visual overlap of symbols and improved the estimation of values.

• 出版日期2012-5