Supporting Interactive Editing of Cartographic Representations in GIS Software

Though cartographic production based on geographic information systems has proven benefits, a major obstacle to the wide acceptance of GIS as a tool for production cartography has been its inflexibility in allowing cartographers to make changes to the representations of geographic features on a feature by feature basis. Consequently, many cartographers work either solely in a vector commercial graphics software package, or they divide their work between GIS and graphics software packages. Software is being developed at ESRI based on the geodatabase to support map finishing in ArcGIS. Cartographer-centric tools allow users to modify feature symbolization and geometry. These tools work with the geodatabase and store changes as overrides that do not effect the underlying GIS data. This paper describes the cartographic finishing software under development at ESRI, with a focus on the design and function of manual cartographic editing tools, supplemented by tools for automating common processes.