1. EXPERT SYSTEM TO CLASSIFY SEMANTIC INFORMATION TO IMPROVE MAP DESIGN Msc. Marcio Augusto Reolon Schmidt Prof. Dra. Luciene Stamato Delazari Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciências Geodésicas Departamento de Geomática UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DO PARANÁ BRAZIL

2. 1- Introduction 2- Social Atlas 3- Expert System 4- ES evaluation and Web implementation

3. INTRODUCTION GIS and Mapping systems accessible to casual users Those systems allow different possibilities for symbol selection and map-building User Classes: ◦ Cartographer ◦ Map-maker users ◦ Decision Maker Maps poorly structured, in magazines, newspapers, and even in scientific literature

4. INTRODUCTION Municipalities and NGO use and generate maps for planning cities and carry out social and ecological analysis Technicians (non cartographers) do not know the Map Design principles The problem in Brazil, seems to be concentrated on how to classify information in terms of level of measurement and, therefore, how to symbolize maps, the final steps of map design

5. INTRODUCTION Major problems founded in those maps: ◦ continuous color ramps representing discrete data ◦ map projections problems ◦ complex symbols with no important information, ◦ “noisy" representation making any trying of interpretation a hard task. Those problems are similar to those pointed by Weibel e Buttenfield (1992)

6. INTRODUCTION Questions that outcomes: If casual users cannot be trained one by one, how is it possible to ensure they will achieve minimal level of understand about correct use of GIS? How to help casual users to classify attributes and symbolize maps according to the principles of map design?

7. THE SOCIAL ATLAS: A SUPPORT TO THE EXPERT SYSTEM

8. INTRODUCTION The objective was support the SETP. This bureau is responsible for define social assistance public policies acting as a governmental manager, defining destination and application for financial resources. SETP technicians in 2000: Delazari in 2004:

11. THE EXPERT SYSTEM

12. DB ES KB DIC EXPERT SYSTEM DB

13. EXPERT SYSTEM INTERFACE

14. DATA FLOW 123 4 5 6

15. EXPERT SYSTEM INTERFACE

17. RESULTS AND EVALUATION The evaluation process: two different groups of users who answered the same questionnaire ◦ 5 cartographers, or people with prior knowledge of mapping software ◦ 6 professionals of Social Assistance, with very little or none experience of map making ◦ Both groups with same set of tasks: insert or editing thematic information on DB and see it on a map ◦ At the end of each task users should answer "yes" or "no" to some questions about their comprehension

18. RESULTS AND EVALUATION We performed a qualitative analysis of results based on the questionnaire answers We analyzed the Social Service technicians in terms of their comprehension, difficulties to use the system and assessment of data classification The cartographers answered the same questionnaire, showing good comprehension of use and implementation of the expert systems and Social Atlas

19. RESULTS AND EVALUATION Difficulties: The wide range of conditions present in the rules can lead to ambiguities in the classification process (language issues) There is a need of continuous dictionary maintenance, because it seems to be sensible to map use context Each context of map use and user requires the development of a specific dictionary

20. Web Version of Atlas Social

21. ACKNOWLEDGMENT Thank You!!!! Please visit our research group website: www.cartografia.ufpr.br