Evaluating the Use of Digital Cartography to Showcase the Intangible Heritage

New narratives are essential for ensuring the sustainability of tourist destinations and improving visitor experience. One key resource destination that can be drawn on is intangible heritage, which digital cartography can help visitors to interpret. The overall objective of this chapter is to analyze—from a multidisciplinary perspective—the opportunities digital cartography offers for the exploitation of literary heritage. The authors present an evaluation tool (validated by experts), whose aim is to analyze the different dimensions and elements that should be incorporated in digital maps. The intention is to enable the analysis of existing digital literary tourism maps and to encourage the future use of the many options offered by digital cartography in maps of this nature.

Interactive Web Maps: Usability Heuristics Proposal

With the evolution of technology, maps have changed how they are produced and consumed. In the 1990s, along with the internet uprise, printed and digital maps began to be shared and viewed on the web, which provided more significant user interaction with the map and geographic data. However, the ease of creating interactive maps using computational resources sometimes neglects cartographic concepts, impairing the interpretation of geographic data and the quality of the interaction between user and system. This work presents ten specific Usability Heuristics for Interactive Web Maps to identify and elaborate a set of criteria that help create and evaluate the quality of interactive web maps. For this, we used a methodology to develop domain-specific Usability Heuristics, composed of eight steps. This paper presents the ten heuristics elaborated along with the attributes of the name, ID, category and definition, and an additional checklist. This new set encompasses both the concepts of cartography and usability, contributing to better user interaction with the system and geographic data.

Definition of the Map

Cartography has undergone great changes in the last 40 years. Many web platforms and location-based services are offering increasing opportunities, paper maps have been largely supplemented by multimedia and digital maps, and spatial databases. The definition of a map has changed throughout history and the differences in their definitions are presented. This paper aims for new central cartographic definitions, corresponding to contemporary cartographic development after presenting the current situation of the topic. Definitions of cartographic mapping, cartography and cartographer are proposed, as well as a new definition of the map. All they are made on the base of logical analyses including different types of maps from traditional and real to virtual, 3D, animation, and digital.

Solving Robust Weighted Independent Set Problems on Trees and under Interval Uncertainty

The maximum weighted independent set (MWIS) problem is important since it occurs in various applications, such as facility location, selection of non-overlapping time slots, labeling of digital maps, etc. However, in real-life situations, input parameters within those models are often loosely defined or subject to change. For such reasons, this paper studies robust variants of the MWIS problem. The study is restricted to cases where the involved graph is a tree. Uncertainty of vertex weights is represented by intervals. First, it is observed that the max–min variant of the problem can be solved in linear time. Next, as the most important original contribution, it is proved that the min–max regret variant is NP-hard. Finally, two mutually related approximation algorithms for the min–max regret variant are proposed. The first of them is already known, but adjusted to the considered situation, while the second one is completely new. Both algorithms are analyzed and evaluated experimentally.

Information technology for the analysis of the dynamic of the carbon balance of forests in Poland

Forest management involves the use of large areas of land and a large amount of related information. Therefore, the use of geographic information technologies (GIS) is substantiated for the processing, analysis, and visualization of information in forest ecosystems. Green plants and trees deposit carbon and retain it for a long time, they are the main absorbers of carbon on land, so to determine the carbon balance the study of wood growth, accumulation of phytomass in forest ecosystems is necessary. The purpose of the work is to develop a toolkit for determining the geo-distributed phytomass of forests for the calculation of deposited carbon according to statistical data of planting stock, species composition, age class, and other silvicultural and taxonomic indicators provided by the official sources. The article provides a description of Polish forests, GIS analysis of tabular data on taxonomic indicators of forest ecosystems, diagrams, and digital maps of forests. The analysis of the forests state in some voivodships of Poland in 2009 and 2019 was conducted to assess emissions and removals of greenhouse gases by forest ecosystems. The three-level scheme of greenhouse gas inventory recommended by the IPCC technique is described. To carry out the inventory, a multilevel mathematical model is used, which includes: the highest level of inventory (level of national inventory), the middle level of inventory (level of region or district), and the inventory lowest level (level of the elementary plots). A comparative analysis of forestry and tax indicators of Polish forests for the period from 2009 to 2019 and the methods used to calculate greenhouse gas emissions and removals are presented. The amount of carbon deposited over a ten-year period by Polish forest ecosystems has been determined. The architecture of geographic information technology for spatial analysis of carbon deposition and greenhouse gas emissions in the Polish forestry sector has been improved and supplemented. Calculations of the deposited carbon were made according to statistical data of planting stock, species composition, age class, and other silvicultural and taxonomic indicators, which are taken from the official sources. The geoinformation approach to the comparative analysis of greenhouse gases for different time intervals is based on the use of the appropriate digital map layers, mathematical models of inventory, statistical information on business results, as well as the use of a number of other specific parameters describing complex greenhouse gas emission and absorption processes. Keywords: GIS; digital maps; greenhouse gases; forests of Poland.

Pendampingan Pembuatan Data Digital Manggis pada Kelompok Tani Bina Mandiri Dusun Nyiurbaye Gawah, Lombok Barat

A digital database of agricultural commodities is indispensable in the 4.0 and social revolution eras of 5.0. The creation of a mangosteen agricultural information system at the Bina Mandiri farmer group is vital to support the sustainability of farming activities in preparation for future export administration. This dissemination was carried out in collaboration with members of the Bina Mandiri farmer group, Nyiurbaye Gawah hamlet, Batu Mekar village, West Lombok district. The purpose of this activity is assistance in digitizing mangosteen trees in making digital maps of mangosteen distribution in the Bina Mandiri farmer group. The implementation of this activity includes: socializing the importance of digital data, collecting primary data and creating a mangosteen agriculture information system that can be connected to a WebGIS page. The result of this activity is the transfer of knowledge and technology of mangosteen mapping to the Bina Mandiri farmer group. In addition, the Bina Mandiri farmer group has digital data related to land and mangosteen trees so that it can be useful for sustainable management and utilization of the remaining space on land for planting mangosteen trees and knowledge of spacing errors that have occurred in the practice of planting mangosteen.

Making the COVID-19 pandemic visible: Grass-roots mapping initiates in Rio de Janeiro

During this past year, digital maps have been used around the world to spatially display COVID-19 cases and deaths. Some of these maps aggregate official government data, and others are built with user-generated content. Particularly in low-income communities, where residents do not have proper access to tests, user-generated maps help people understand the scope of the pandemic. Two examples of grass-roots initiatives that use maps to make the pandemic visible are Conexão Saúde and Painel Unificador de Favelas. Both emerged in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), one of the countries mostly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper describes the implementation of these initiatives, considering how networked grass-roots approaches can be effective in locally mapping a pandemic. The findings reveal that the interconnection among mobile platforms, community leaders and NGOs are critical socio-technical assemblages that help visualize a public health crisis that would otherwise remain invisible to the world.