Understanding User Needs for Map Symbol Standards in Emergency Management

Robinson Anthony C, Roth Robert E and MacEachren Alan M
Additional contact information
Robinson Anthony C: The Pennsylvania State University
Roth Robert E: University of Wisconsin-Madison
MacEachren Alan M: The Pennsylvania State University

Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, 2011, vol. 8, issue 1, 16

Abstract: Standardizing and coordinating information is a key challenge for supporting effective emergency management practices. Conventions can be established to ensure collaborators can find common ground quickly during an emergency, but developing such conventions remains difficult amidst continual evolution and diversification in information sources and products. For example, maps are critical to many emergency management situations and cartographers in a wide range of government organizations currently employ a broad range of symbols for their mapping needs. These cartographers must be able to develop geographic information products to support many different mission areas, and map users in an emergency situation must be able to readily understand what they are seeing. Standardizing map symbology can help ensure that geographic information is consumable, but developing standards is a non trivial task. The ANSI 415-2006 INCITS Homeland Security Map Symbol Standard was designed to standardize point symbols for emergency management mapping within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In this paper, we report the results of a series of interviews conducted with DHS cartographers and map users to characterize the adoption and use of the ANSI standard, to identify the use of other map symbol standards, to identify critical incidents regarding map symbology, to explore technical and organizational challenges for standard development, and to elicit ideas for new processes for developing map symbol standards that support homeland security.

Keywords: symbology; cartography; emergency management; standardization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1547-7355.1811 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:johsem:v:8:y:2011:i:1:p:16:n:28

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/jhsem/html

DOI: 10.2202/1547-7355.1811

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management is currently edited by Irmak Renda-Tanali

More articles in Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().