A Cartographic Animation Of Uncertainty And Fuzziness In Spatial Planning

The Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment promotes the DURP initiative which aims at digital, exchangeable and comparable spatial plans. Many municipalities and provinces have already achieved digital plans for new spatial plans. However, the first experiences show that not all planning objects are comparable because some of them are uncertain and fuzzy. Among the users are spatial planners at different administrative levels who, in the plan preparation phase, are confronted with two problems of uncertainty and fuzziness. One problem is created by incompletely defined planning objects which are currently represented by cartographic symbols in spatial planning maps. These planning objects, of which the location, boundaries, orientation, size and/or shape are not well defined, can therefore not be judged exactly. The second problem is that planners are not able to correctly judge how some features that are continuous in reality influence options for possible future types of space use. This happens because these continuous features are discretely defined and conventionally represented by crisp boundaries on the map (e.g. a solid noise contour around a noise source at one noise level only). The presence of the problems above imposes research challenges on visualization of uncertainty and fuzziness in spatial planning maps.This research concentrates on developing methods to effectively visualize uncertainty and fuzziness in animated representations by various combinations of graphic and dynamic visualization variables, and selecting or developing a method by which the usability of uncertainty and fuzziness displays in spatial planning maps can be evaluated. As a case study, provincial level spatial planning data of Noord-Brabant, the Netherlands were used. A conceptual framework for animated representation of uncertainty and fuzziness in spatial planning maps was proposed. Subsequently, the animated representations were designed and implemented in a prototype. For the usability study, the prototype was evaluated in a focus group session and a task and questionnaire session. The opinions and responses on the prototype provided by the focus group session were used to improve the prototype to minimize use problems in the later evaluation. Subsequently, the task and questionnaire session with the improved prototype was conducted to discover recognition of the uncertain and fuzzy aspects of spatial planning objects and to obtain usability scores for the animated representations. The results show that the spatial planners can be better aware of the uncertainty and fuzziness in spatial planning maps from such animated representations.