Abstract: Trans-national construction companies (TNCCs) would need information when venturing overseas to increase their share of the global construction market and to achieve a higher level of global performance. A good marketing information system is thus important to develop strategic marketing plans. Against this setting, the importance of a marketing information system is becoming more apparent today; however its application remained limited in the construction field. For this purpose, the aim of this study is to develop an iterative computer system using cartograms for TNCCs to gain information relating to the which, where, why and when of global construction. A cartogram is a representation of a map which shows quantitative information, thereby rendering spatial comparison between countries/regions possible. The use of computer-based cartography can therefore effectively yield a clearer representation of geographical attributes in the global construction market. This study develops, for the first time, a computer-based cartography approach to analyzing and presenting the EU construction market. The research design comprises of several stages that produce an appropriate computer-based cartography that can clearly reflect the relative positions/potentials of all the countries/regions in the world which can be used to analyze the global construction market for TNCCs. Following the development of the global cartogram, further studies can be undertaken to analyze the correlations which the construction industry may have with other economic variables such as GDP and population, and with other economic sectors such as manufacturing and agriculture. A proto-type computer-based cartogram for the EU construction market will be presented in the paper.

Abstract: A dynamic map that recursively uses a cartogram algorithm in a nested structure to distort shape, enlarging any areas of user interest or focus, has been implemented and tested. The map organises space into a hierarchy of commonly-perceived geographical areas, which is the structure upon which distortion takes place (island at the country level, provinces at the regional level, districts, cities and suburbs). This approach is proposed to be more usable than traditional methods of multi-scale representation or moving between scales. The advantage of using this system is that the local view is expanded, whilst still allowing the global view to be maintained. Although akin to the fisheye display, the novel use of an automated cartogram (with area effectively being proportional to user interest) means that distortion calculation occurs to a great extent only where it is needed, to preserve the local egocentric view, whilst harnessing the cartogram’s ability to maintain approximate geographical shape.

Abstract: The authors use 1981 census data to create a cartogram showing the counties of New Zealand in proportion to their population. (ANNOTATION)

Abstract: Many cartographers have for many years searched for a way to construct cartograms in which the sizes of geographic areas such as states, counties or census tracts are rescaled in proportion to their population or some other socio-economic properties While many techniques and algorithms for creating cartograms have been proposed, some of them are still extremely complex to generate in a proper manner, and many of them suffer either from this lack of readability or from seamless integration with GIS software This paper, therefore, presents a simple population cartogram technique based on the Circular Cartogram Algorithm(CCA) by Dorling(1996) to tackle these drawbacks by drawing the areas as simple circles for use as a base map and linking the construction with GIS mapping processes For an automated approach in the cartogram generation, this paper proposes a close coupling method of ArcView GIS 33 package in order for users to access to the cartogram algorithm Then, they will be available through an interface that the ArcView GIS system allows user-written routines to be accessed easily The CCA and its coupling architecture ensure to improve the potential applicability of the use of cartograms to census mapping at practical levels As the cartogram examples, cartograms of population and property types in 2005 Korea census data sets are illustrated in the end, by which viewers can easily identify the residential concentration and their relative ratio in Seoul metropolitan area

Abstract: Cartograms are tools that show the spatial distribution of data by the transformation of map shapes, and they are considered as effective visualization tools for statistical data. In this paper, we focus on cartograms because they are capable of developing statistical GIS, and we propose cartogram construction algorithms. First, we establish the following principles for algorithm development I. Describe cartogram construction problems by the linear least squares method to simplify and elucidate algorithms. II. Regularize the problems through restrictions on the bearing changes of the edges in order to obtain visually clear cartograms in which the shapes of resultant regions resemble the corresponding shapes on geographical maps. Then, according to the principles, we propose construction algorithms for three types of cartograms and illustrate their applicability to the visualization of statistical data.

Abstract: Graph Drawing is a relatively young area that combines elements of graph theory, algorithms, (computational) geometry and (computational) topology. Research in this field concentrates on developing algorithms for drawing graphs while satisfying certain aesthetic criteria. These criteria are often expressed in properties like edge complexity, number of edge crossings, angular resolutions, shapes of faces or graph symmetries and in general aim at creating a drawing of a graph that conveys the information to the reader in the best possible way. Graph drawing has applications in a wide variety of areas which include cartography, VLSI design and information visualization. In this thesis we consider several graph drawing problems. The first problem we address is rectilinear cartogram construction. A cartogram, also known as value-by-area map, is a technique used by cartographers to visualize statistical data over a set of geographical regions like countries, states or counties. The regions of a cartogram are deformed such that the area of a region corresponds to a particular geographic variable. The shapes of the regions depend on the type of cartogram. We consider rectilinear cartograms of constant complexity, that is cartograms where each region is a rectilinear polygon with a constant number of vertices. Whether a cartogram is good is determined by how closely the cartogram resembles the original map and how precisely the area of its regions describe the associated values. The cartographic error is defined for each region as jAciAsj=As, where Ac is the area of the region in the cartogram and As is the specified area of that region, given by the geographic variable to be shown. In this thesis we consider the construction of rectilinear cartograms that have correct adjacencies of the regions and zero cartographic error. We show that any plane triangulated graph admits a rectilinear cartogram where every region has at most 40 vertices which can be constructed in O(nlogn) time. We also present experimental results that show that in practice the algorithm works significantly better than suggested by the complexity bounds. In our experiments on real-world data we were always able to construct a cartogram where the average number of vertices per region does not exceed five. Since a rectangle has four vertices, this means that most of the regions of our rectilinear car tograms are in fact rectangles. Moreover, the maximum number vertices of each region in these cartograms never exceeded ten. The second problem we address in this thesis concerns cased drawings of graphs. The vertices of a drawing are commonly marked with a disk, but differentiating between vertices and edge crossings in a dense graph can still be difficult. Edge casing is a wellknown method—used, for example, in electrical drawings, when depicting knots, and, more generally, in information visualization—to alleviate this problem and to improve the readability of a drawing. A cased drawing orders the edges of each crossing and interrupts the lower edge in an appropriate neighborhood of the crossing. One can also envision that every edge is encased in a strip of the background color and that the casing of the upper edge covers the lower edge at the crossing. If there are no application-specific restrictions that dictate the order of the edges at each crossing, then we can in principle choose freely how to arrange them. However, certain orders will lead to a more readable drawing than others. In this thesis we formulate aesthetic criteria for a cased drawing as optimization problems and solve these problems. For most of the problems we present either a polynomial time algorithm or demonstrate that the problem is NP-hard. Finally we consider a combinatorial question in computational topology concerning three types of objects: closed curves in the plane, surfaces immersed in the plane, and surfaces embedded in space. In particular, we study casings of closed curves in the plane to decide whether these curves can be embedded as the boundaries of certain special surfaces. We show that it is NP-complete to determine whether an immersed disk is the projection of a surface embedded in space, or whether a curve is the boundary of an immersed surface in the plane that is not constrained to be a disk. However, when a casing is supplied with a self-intersecting curve, describing which component of the curve lies above and which below at each crossing, we can determine in time linear in the number of crossings whether the cased curve forms the projected boundary of a surface in space. As a related result, we show that an immersed surface with a single boundary curve that crosses itself n times has at most 2n=2 combinatorially distinct spatial embeddings and we discuss the existence of fixed-parameter tractable algorithms for related problems.