Paper

Artificial Intelligence Studies in Cartography: A Review and Synthesis of Methods, Applications, and Ethics

Kang, Yuhao, Gao, Song, Roth, Robert E

2023

Overview

The past decade has witnessed the rapid development of geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) primarily due to the ground-breaking achievements in deep learning and machine learning. A growing number of scholars from cartography have demonstrated successfully that GeoAI can accelerate previously complex cartographic design tasks and even enable cartographic creativity in new ways. Despite the promise of GeoAI, researchers and practitioners have growing concerns about the ethical issues of GeoAI for cartography. In this paper, we conducted a systematic content analysis and narrative synthesis of research studies integrating GeoAI and cartography to summarize current research and development trends regarding the usage of GeoAI for cartographic design. Based on this review and synthesis, we first identify dimensions of GeoAI methods for cartography such as data sources, data formats, map evaluations, and six contemporary GeoAI models, each of which serves a variety of cartographic tasks. These models include decision trees, knowledge graph and semantic web technologies, deep convolutional neural networks, generative adversarial networks, graph neural networks, and reinforcement learning. Further, we summarize seven cartographic design applications where GeoAI have been effectively employed: generalization, symbolization, typography, map reading, map interpretation, map analysis, and map production. We also raise five potential ethical challenges that need to be addressed in the integration of GeoAI for cartography: commodification, responsibility, privacy, bias, and (together) transparency, explainability, and provenance. We conclude by identifying four potential research directions for future cartographic research with GeoAI: GeoAI-enabled active cartographic symbolism, human-in-the-loop GeoAI for cartography, GeoAI-based mapping-as-a-service, and generative GeoAI for cartography.

• Publisher: Cornell University Library, arXiv.org
• Subject: Artificial intelligence / Artificial neural networks / Cartography / Content analysis / Decision trees / Deep learning / Ethics / Generative adversarial networks / Graph neural networks / Knowledge representation / Machine learning / Map interpretation / Neural networks / R&D / Research & development / Semantic web / Synthesis / Task complexity / Typography