About
305
Publications
166,171
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
3,912
Citations
Introduction
Hello, I am a surveying engineer by training, for >35 years specialised in cartography. I am involved in research and teaching in cartography at ETH Zurich.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (305)
Climate change has global consequences, and Switzerland is no exception. The communication of climate change poses various challenges, and maps are often part of this process. This work presents three maps illustrating the impacts of climate change, developed for the Atlas of Switzerland (AoS), an interactive digital national atlas. The aim is to m...
The rapid and impactful growth of urban areas necessitates a thorough understanding of settlement development pathways to inform effective urban planning. This study investigates settlement developments on the Swiss Plateau from 1899 to 2021, focusing on identifying, describing, and predicting archetypes of settlement development. Using historical...
AI ethics narratives have the potential to shape the public accurate understanding of AI technologies and promote communication among different stakeholders. However, AI ethics narratives are largely lacking. Existing limited narratives tend to center on works of science fiction or corporate marketing campaigns of large technology companies. Misuse...
Tracking geographic entities from historical maps, such as buildings, offers valuable insights into cultural heritage, urbanization patterns, environmental changes, and various historical research endeavors. However, linking these entities across diverse maps remains a persistent challenge for researchers. Traditionally, this has been addressed thr...
Automated feature detection in historical maps can significantly accelerate the reconstruction of the geospatial past. However, this process is often constrained by the time-consuming task of manually digitizing sufficient high-quality training data. The emergence of visual foundation models, such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), offers a promi...
Historical maps provide valuable information and knowledge about the past. However, as they often feature non-standard projections, hand-drawn styles, and artistic elements, it is challenging for non-experts to identify and interpret them. While existing image captioning methods have achieved remarkable success on natural images, their performance...
Maps are broadly relevant across various fields, serving as valuable tools for presenting spatial phenomena and communicating spatial knowledge. However, map-making is still largely confined to those with expertise in GIS and cartography due to the specialized software and complex workflow involved, from data processing to visualization. While gene...
Historical maps are invaluable for analyzing long-term changes in transportation and spatial development, offering a rich source of data for evolutionary studies. However, digitizing and classifying road networks from these maps is often expensive and time-consuming, limiting their widespread use. Recent advancements in deep learning have made auto...
On many maps, relief shading is one of the most significant graphical elements. Modern relief shading techniques include neural networks. To generate such shading automatically at an arbitrary scale, one needs to consider how the resolution of the input digital elevation model (DEM) relates to the neural network process and the maps used for traini...
Reducing the complexity of the workflow for historical map vectorization is essential to promote the widespread utilization of historical spatial data. Traditional pixel-wise segmentation followed by vectorization workflows suffer from tedious post-processing steps. To address this challenge, we introduce an innovative pure vector-based workflow. T...
The legacy of historic anthropogenic disturbance can significantly affect the structure and function of contemporary freshwater ecosystems. Environmental research and management that neglect anthropogenic legacy are likely to lead to a biased interpretation of present and future ecosystem dynamics. Yet, anthropogenic legacy remains poorly considere...
Historical maps depict past states of the Earth’s surface and make it possible to trace the natural or anthropogenic evolution of geographic objects back through time. However, the state of the depicted reality is not the only source of change: maps of varying age can differ in terms of graphical design, and also in terms of storage conditions, phy...
Historical road data are often needed for different purposes, such as tracking the evolution of road networks, spatial data integration, and urban sprawl investigation. However, road extraction from historical maps is challenging due to their dissatisfying quality, the difficulty in distinguishing road symbols from those of other features (e.g., is...
In this work, we present an automated workflow to bring human figures, one of the most frequently appearing entities on pictorial maps, to the third dimension. Our workflow is based on training data (i.e., SMPL-X, AGORA) and neural networks for single-view 3D reconstruction of real humans from photos. We first let a network consisting of fully conn...
Since landforms composing land surface vary in their properties and appearance, their shaded reliefs also present different visual impression of the terrain. In this work, we adapt a U-Net so that it can recognize a selection of landforms and can segment terrain. We test the efficiency of 10 separate models and apply an ensemble approach, where all...
Before modern earth observation techniques came into being, historical maps are almost the exclusive source to retrieve geo-spatial information on Earth. In recent years, the use of deep learning for historical map processing has gained popularity to replace tedious manual labor. However, neural networks, often referred to as “black boxes”, usually...
Efficiently detecting features from historical maps is a challenging task due to its inconsistent manual scribbling styles and the lack of large scale labelled training data. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes an automatic feature detection pipeline utilizing CNN-based template matching (TM), which can lead to efficient feature extraction wi...
Long-term retrospective road data are required for various analyses (e.g., investigation of urban sprawl, analysis of road network evolution). Yet, it is challenging to extract roads from scanned historical maps due to their dissatisfying quality. Although deep learning has been exerting its superiority in image segmentation, its application to roa...
Historical maps are almost the exclusive source to trace back the characteristics of earth before modern earth observation techniques came into being. Processing historical maps is challenging due to the factors such as diverse designs and scales, or inherent noise from painting, aging, and scanning. Our paper is the first to leverage uncertainty e...
Human figures frequently occur on pictorial maps besides other illustrative entities. In this work, we present how to automatically derive 3D depictions from these 2D human figures. Previous research has shown that silhouettes, body parts, and joints of 2D human figures in common poses can be detected on pictorial maps by artificial neural networks...
Cadastral system plays a pivotal role in land administration, which has attracted notable attention from researchers and policy-makers worldwide. Despite China being the most populous country throughout the world, its cadastral system is rarely studied. This paper conducts a comprehensive survey on the evolution of the Chinese cadastral system by e...
In recent years, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been applied successfully to recognise persons, their body parts and pose keypoints in photos and videos. The transfer of these techniques to artificially created images is rather unexplored, though challenging since these images are drawn in different styles, body proportions, and levels o...
Maps contain abundant geospatial information, such as roads, settlements, and river networks, to name a few. The need to access this information to carry out analyses (e.g., in transportation, landscape planning, or ecology), as well as advances in software and hardware technologies, have driven the development of workflows to efficiently extract f...
This community roadmap presents an integrative approach including the most urgent infrastructure requests for the future development of geosciences in Switzerland. It recommends to strengthen the multidisciplinary nature of the geosciences by putting all activities under the roof of the Integrated Swiss Geosciences supported by four specific resear...
Shaded relief is an effective method for visualising terrain on topographic maps, especially when the direction of illumination is adapted locally to emphasise individual terrain features. However, digital shading algorithms are unable to fully match the expressiveness of hand-crafted masterpieces, which are created through a laborious process by h...
Digitalization in schools requires a rethinking of teaching materials and methods in all subjects. This upheaval also concerns traditional print media, like school atlases used in geography classes. In this work, we examine the cartographic technological feasibility of extending a printed school atlas with digital content by augmented reality (AR)....
Shaded relief is an effective method for visualising terrain on topographic maps, especially when the direction of illumination is adapted locally to emphasise individual terrain features. However, digital shading algorithms are unable to fully match the expressiveness of hand-crafted masterpieces, which are created through a laborious process by h...
In this work, realistically drawn objects are identified on digital maps by convolutional neural networks. For the first two experiments, 6200 images were retrieved from Pinterest. While alternating image input options, two binary classifiers based on Xception and InceptionResNetV2 were trained to separate maps and pictorial maps. Results showed th...
Digitalization in schools requires a rethinking of teaching materials and methods in all subjects. This upheaval also concerns traditional print media, like school atlases used in geography classes. In this work, we examine the cartographic technological feasibility of extending a printed school atlas with digital content by augmented reality (AR)....
As relief influences disposition of all the other objects displayed on maps, terrain representation plays one of the key roles in the map creation process. Originally a manual technique, relief shading creates the three-dimensional effect and allows the user to read the terrain in an intuitive way. With the advent of digital elevation models (DEMs)...
Determining the risk related to transportation networks due to the occurrence of (natural) hazard events often requires computer support. A simulation-based modeling environment can be useful when modeling a set of related events that lead up to the estimation of the probable consequences of hazard events, which affect network managers and society....
Extracting features from printed maps has been a challenge for decades; historical maps pose an even larger problem due to manual, inconsistent drawing or scribing, low printing quality, and geometrical distortions. In this article, a new workflow is introduced, consisting of a segmentation step and a vectorization step to acquire high‐quality poly...
This article contributes to understanding the difference between objective space and subjective place. New data models and visual methods, which make possible the comparison between dream settings, are necessary to an exploratory analysis of dreams. The subjective perception of settings is decomposed by studying dream reports, by applying a survey,...
Atlas-Informationssysteme (AIS) – systematisch angelegte und kuratierte digitale Sammlungen raumbezogener Informationen – dienen dazu, mittels Karten und Multimedia-Elementen Sachverhalte und Prozesse interaktiv zu visualisieren, zu explorieren und zu analysieren. Sie ermöglichen eine raum-zeitliche und thematische Kombination der Kartendaten zur I...
The 3D national atlas application Atlas of Switzerland – online (Sieber et al. 2015) currently consists of over 160 thematic maps. Many of them contain multiple datasets over time which themselves are composed of over 400,000 map objects in total. Together with more than 20,000 geo objects (e.g. municipalities, mountains) the sheer amount of inform...
Thoroughly prepared historical map data can facilitate research in a wide range of domains, including ecology and hydrology (e.g., for preservation and renaturation), urban planning and architecture (e.g., to analyse the settlement development), geology and insurance (e.g., to derive indicators of past natural hazards to estimate future events), an...
Storytelling is a popular technique applied in many fields including cartography. On the one hand, stories can be told intrinsically by map elements per se. An often quoted example in this regard is Minard’s map of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign (e.g. Denil 2017) which depicts the loss of troops in a spatio-temporally aligned Sankey diagram. On the ot...
The science of cartography has evolved significantly during the last years. Major developments have been achieved in the specific areas of output media, map production technologies and dissemination channels. The existence of several freely available web-mapping tools (e.g. JavaScript mapping libraries) encourages a broader community of users to pr...
Atlases are designed to visualize, explore and analyze topographic and thematic information in a geographic environment. As 3D data and real-time display techniques are increasingly available, a trend towards 3D atlases can be observed like the newly released Earth 3D Amazing Atlas (2017) and the Atlas of Switzerland – online (2016). While creating...
Motivation
In 2015/2016 the Zentralbibliothek Zürich (ZB, Zurich Central Library) and the Swiss Society of Cartography (SSC) presented a map blog to mark the 2015/16 International Map Year. In this weekly blog, cartographer and map librarian Markus Oehrli described and commented on 70 known and less-known Swiss map documents. In 2017, the map histo...
Many printed school atlases do not only comprise a collection of topographic and thematic maps or illustrations to convey geographic topics at different school levels, but also infographics and text introducing key concepts and methods of cartography and geo-information. However, this was not the case for previous editions of the printed Swiss Worl...
One of the key roles in map creation belongs to terrain representation. Relief shading is a traditional manual technique allowing users to perceive the terrain in an intuitive and naturalistic way. With the advent of digital elevation models (DEM), analytical relief shading came into a wider use, since it is faster, requires less effort and deliver...
The establishment of a National Atlas requires a broad view on the thematic content. Traditionally, maps in atlases are accessed by selecting topics from a thematically structured menu. Many important and complex decisions have to be made by map authors regarding the selection and structure of topics which are considered as the essence of an atlas....
The latest edition of the SWISS WORLD ATLAS, published in 2017, is coordinated with the didactic structure of the recently introduced geography curriculum on secondary school level in Switzerland. It represents an interdisciplinary tool for teaching and learning in geography lessons.
During the preparation and distribution phase of the new atlas, t...
Creating maps for their dreams enable dreamers to better attend to them. However, mapping dreams is not an easy task due to the particularities of the dream space. Therefore, there is a need of specific cartographic tools for this purpose. This work illustrates the process of creating a Web platform for mapping dreams, functional requirements are s...
Map projections are one of the foundations of geographic information science and cartography. An understanding of the different projection variants and properties is critical when creating maps or carrying out geospatial analyses. The common way of teaching map projections in text books makes use of the light source (or light bulb) metaphor, which...
In recent years, pedestrian navigation assistance has been used by an increasing number of people to support wayfinding tasks. Especially in unfamiliar and complex indoor environments such as universities and hospitals, the importance of an effective navigation assistance becomes apparent. This paper investigates the feasibility of the indoor landm...
Geospatial data are now widely available to the general public thanks to geoportals and online mapping platforms. However, creating a map involves more than just combining data layers. Thus we develop cartographic functions for geoportals to support better visual hierarchy in user map mashups. This includes a couple of preparatory steps followed by...
Dream reports are short pieces of text, where a dreamer summarises the remembered experience of nightly dreams. Dream Cartography addresses especially the spatial information contained in dream reports. In this context, the current formalisation of space in GIScience such as points, lines, polygons, or labels, including place names or addresses, is...
Rock depiction in Swiss topographic maps has evolved from humble line drawings into expressive renderings indicating slope, aspect and traversability. In this paper, an automatic method to derive monochrome Swiss-style rock hachures from a raster elevation model is presented. The proper placement and light modulation of the linear strokes depend on...
Map projections are one of the fundamental concepts of geographic information science and cartography. An understanding of the different variants and properties is critical when creating maps or carrying out geospatial analyses. To support learning about map projections, we present an online tool that allows to interactively explore the constructio...
Map projections are one of the fundamental concepts of geographic information science and cartography. An understanding of the different variants and properties is critical when creating maps or carrying out geospatial analyses. To support learning about map projections, we present an online tool that allows to interactively explore the constructio...
Networks such as transportation, water, and power are critical lifelines for society. Managers plan and execute interventions to guarantee the operational state of their networks under various circumstances, including after the occurrence of (natural) hazard events. Creating an intervention program demands knowing the probable direct and indirect c...
Geoportals are used to support the sharing of geospatial data for various purposes. In recent years, the importance of such geoportals in an academic environment is highly recognized. Equipped with the latest and most detailed spatial datasets these academic geoportals can support universities in numerous activities including research and teaching....
The Topographic Atlas of Switzerland, short “Siegfried map”, is a historical map
series covering the whole of Switzerland for the time period between 1870 and 1926.
Georeferencing each single map sheet in a high quality is critical to minimize error
propagation when subsequent tasks are to be performed, such as feature extraction or sheet compariso...
Custom user maps (also called map mashups) made on geoportals by novice users often lead to poor cartographic results, because cartographic expertise is not part of the mapmaking process. In order to integrate cartographic design functionality within a geoportal, we explored several strategies and design choices. These strategies aimed at integrati...
The quantification of probable network-related consequences resulting from the occurrence of (natural) hazard events supports network managers in determining the most suitable interventions to execute. This assessment should include the modelling of consequences related to the use of the network and the levels of service. A method is presented to q...
A quantitative approach to conduct a specific type of stress test on road networks is presented in this article. The objective is to help network managers determine whether their networks would perform adequately during and after the occurrence of hazard events. Conducting a stress test requires (i) modifying an existing risk model (i.e., a model t...
The objective of interactive geographic maps is to provide geographic information to a large audience in a captivating and intuitive way. Storytelling helps to create exciting experiences and to explain complex or otherwise hidden relationships of geospatial data. Furthermore, interactive 3D applications offer a wide range of attractive elements fo...
Networks, such as transportation, water, and power, are critical lifelines to society. Managers plan and execute interventions to guarantee the operational state of their networks under various circumstances, including after the occurrence of (natural) hazard events. Creating an intervention program demands knowing the probable consequences (i.e.,...
Emerging methodologies for risk assessments of civil infrastructure networks require the coupling of several spatiotemporal models that need to be executed multiple times with varying parametrizations to account for model uncertainty and to investigate "what-if " scenarios. These requirements led to the development of a software environment to supp...
Thematic maps are used in a wide range of scientific fields to illustrate specific geographic phenomena. For their correct construction, the mapmaker has to select the appropriate data, and then consider different parameters and constraints in order to visualize them effectively. In this paper, these parameters were analyzed, so that a consistent a...
What are the cartographic pitfalls in map mashups on geoportals? What can we do as cartographers?
Historical settlement development was always a topic of great interest for many researchers who analyze the spatial development of an area through time. The study of settlement development is based mainly on the analysis of historical documents, old maps, topographic diagrams or city plans from different time periods. Additionally, historical textu...
Cloud computing has redefined the way in which Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and Web geoportals are designed, managed, and maintained. The cloudification of a geoportal represents the migration of a full-stack geoportal application to an internet-based private or public cloud. This work introduces two generic and open cloud-based architectures...
Emerging methodologies for natural hazard risk assessments involve the execution of a multitude of different interacting simulation models that produce vast amounts of spatio-temporal datasets. This data pool is further enlarged when such simulation results are post-processed using GIS operations, for example to derive information for decision-maki...
Networks such as transport, water and power are critical lifelines to society. Network managers plan and execute interventions to guarantee their operational state under various circumstances, including after the occurrence of (natural) hazard events. Creating an intervention program demands knowing the probable network-related consequences (i.e.,...
Thanks to the growth of geoportal products and online cartographic platforms, access to spatial data has never been so easy for so many people. But access to cartographic knowledge for laypersons using such data is lagging behind. Platforms that allow users to create map mashups from diverse data sources can lead to unsatisfactory cartographic visu...
Settlement development is a topic of great interest for many researchers from different scientific areas. The research on this topic is based on historic city plans and maps from different time periods, or even on historical textual data, which can give information concerning the construction year of the buildings or information about expansions of...
In the field of fictional and literary geography, the spatial information is conveyed through the power of words by one person: the author of the novel or, in the case of Dream Cartography, by the dreamer. Every story takes place somewhere. However, the acquisition of geographic information differs conceptually from the geography of the real, physi...
Animations of 3D objects are an integral part of 3D animated movies and 3D computer games. Many concepts, such as key frames or procedural animations, originate from these two domains to simulate smooth and realistic movements. With the rise of virtual globe engines, real-time animations of 3D models receive attention also in cartography. While met...
Περίληψη:
Η ιστορική εξέλιξη των οικισμών σε μια περιοχή αποτελεί αντικείμενο ενδιαφέροντος για πολλούς ερευνητές δίνοντας τους την ευκαιρία να μελετήσουν την ανάπτυξη μιας περιοχής με το πέρασμα των χρόνων. Η μελέτη της ιστορικής εξέλιξης των οικισμών βασίζεται κατά κύριο λόγο σε ιστορικούς χάρτες, τοπογραφικά διαγράμματα ή σχέδια πόλης, που απεικ...
The result of WP4 is a process to assess infrastructure related risks due to natural hazards with stress
tests. The risk assessment process is applicable independent of the hazard to be considered, the
infrastructure objects to be taken into account and the types of consequences to be considered.
Additionally, the process can be used to take into c...
Historical maps from different periods of time are very important for many types of research. They can show the development of a place through the time and their use can be profitable in different studies concerning the geographic analysis of terrain, environmental changes and the development of landscape and settlements in a specific area. These s...
Interactive atlas systems are products of high cartographic quality and user-targeted functionality. The main challenge for future digital atlases will be to incorporate the new trends of 3D mapping, online and mobile applications into atlas design. The Atlas of Switzerland, an example of a mature digital atlas, tries to advance these trends togeth...
Geoportals play a major role in geospatial data distribution to end-users like researchers and engineers. For maximum effectiveness, an intuitive and comprehensive graphical user interface (GUI) is a paramount property of such portals. GeoVITe (GEOdata Visualization and Interactive Training Environment) is a geodata-sharing portal, providing ETH Zu...
Integrated modeling approaches are being increasingly used to simulate the behavior of, and the interaction between, several interdependent systems. They are becoming more and more important in many fields, including, but not being limited to, civil engineering, hydrology and climate impact research. It is beneficial when using these approaches to...
In this paper, a process is presented to ensure that infrastructure is managed so that levels of
infrastructure related risk due to natural hazards are acceptable. This is the process being proposed
within Work Package 4 of the European Research Project “Novel indicators for identifying critical
infrastructure at risk from natural hazards (INFRARIS...
There is an increasing demand for renewable electricity sources, due to the global efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. Despite the promising effects, only a limited amount of electricity is currently produced globally from solar power. In order to help countries realize the importance of tapping into solar energy, it is crucial to reveal the potential...
