Map Makers on High Road to High Tech : Electronics Reducing Production Time, Permitting Wider Uses
Making the hundreds of revisions required each year for its popular Orange County map book now takes up five months for the staff at Irvine-based Thomas Bros. Maps.
But when the company begins converting to computerized cartography next year, it anticipates that the move will save it a significant chunk of production time, and also will enable it to launch a new line of electronic maps.
From tracking trash pickup routes to charting the flow from a contaminated well, the marriage of computers and maps has opened new vistas for map makers and users that would have astonished the ancient Greeks, who are generally credited with making some of the first usable maps.
Computerized mapping technology, which allows cartographers to convert existing maps to electronic tape, also has vastly expanded the applications for mapping and the accuracy and accessibility of the maps that are on tape.
In computerized mapping systems, enormous amounts of data associated with a particular point on a map can be filed electronically, allowing the user to summon various types of data associated with any particular geographic point.
A developer, for example, could call up a map of a piece of land and then, by typing his requests into a computer terminal, use the base map to display all existing and proposed zoning, roads, sewers, telephone and power lines, underground gas and water mains and just about anything else connected with the parcel, including the distribution of flora and fauna.
Political analysts could obtain a new version of the old voter registration list--electronic maps that come with data packages giving complete demographic and voter registration information on each household.
“We’ve barely scratched the surface (of the new technology),” said Stephen Hoffman, an engineer with Intergraph Corp. in Irvine, makers of computerized map-making equipment.
A look over Carlos Bustos’ shoulder illustrates how electronics has trimmed the cost and time of making maps.
One recent project for Bustos, owner and chief cartographer of Aerial Topographic Maps in Tustin, was a commission to make a large-scale map of a tract in the San Gabriel Valley slated for further development.
Using a $100,000 plotting machine that helps measure elevation and helps transfer surface features to paper from an aerial photo, Bustos took one day to complete the map and a second day to inscribe all the street labels and other notations. Total cost to the engineering company that ordered the map was $970, which included the expenses of taking the aerial photos that formed the basis of the map.
Without the computerized equipment, making the map would have been about 70% more expensive and taken several more days, Bustos said.
For Aerial Topographic and other companies whose work is the necessary first step for a builder, the increase in demand for their services in recent years is directly connected to the general vigor of the economy.
40 Firms in L.A. Area
“If building slumps, we’re the first to know it,” said Tom Rattray, whose Santa Ana-based Rattray & Associates makes maps and charts for government agencies and engineering companies. In all, there are about 40 map-making companies in the Los Angeles area.
And even if building slumps, Rattray and other map makers will benefit from the information explosion that increasingly is linking data with maps.
Rand McNally & Co., the world’s largest map maker, is automating its map-making processes and already is electronically mating data with maps.
In one project for a major airline, Rand McNally took a four-foot stack of data showing the home bases of the airline’s frequent travelers and meshed the data with a digitized map. The resulting package enabled the carrier to quickly see where its program was successful and, more important, where it needed to do more marketing.
Accomplishing such a task manually “would be massively expensive and time-consuming,” said Con Erickson, a spokesman for the Skokie, Ill., cartographer.
About a third of New York City is now represented on digital maps and officials estimate that the electronic mapping of the entire city will be completed within two years.
The ability to couple enormous amounts of computerized data with the maps has created “a whole new demand for cartographic information that never existed,” said Bruce Cornwell, director of computer mapping and graphics for the city.
Power Lines Displayed
Among other applications, New York uses its $1-million system to display properties that are delinquent in tax payments. Compiling such information by hand would be “virtually impossible,” Cornwell said, and would result in “one humongous pile of print-outs.”
In Boise, Ida., six city agencies have agreed to jointly develop a computerized base map of the city that will then have electronic overlays of each utility’s power lines, pipelines or roads. Boise’s effort apparently will be one of the most comprehensive of such joint efforts in the nation.
Besides reducing duplication of effort by municipal agencies, electronic mapping has considerable potential for business and industry. Rather than voyaging from agency to agency checking power lines at one, water connections at another and zoning at a third, a developer could check everything at one computer terminal simply by calling up different overlays to the base map.
In Orange County, a developer who wants to check the assessor’s map for a certain area must get the correct map from among 17,000 on file. Computerizing the maps “is the next major order of business after we do some other automation,” said Webster Guillory, chief of management services for the assessor.
About 100 of Los Angeles County’s 4,000 square miles are represented by digital maps and the completed system will replace 90,000 paper maps. Like other computerized maps, applications are limitless. A developer, for example, could create a custom-made map showing all the industrially zoned property in a designated sector.
Applications in Africa
In Africa, where large areas have been stricken by famine, such quick access to mapped information can be of lifesaving significance. An agency of the United Nations is using a digitized information base to analyze areas suitable for new agricultural production, apparently the first-ever attempt to integrate data and maps to look at an entire continent.
And Environmental Systems Research Institute in Redlands has built an automated geographic information system for Kenya that will be used for a variety of tasks, including management of food production and the focusing of urban growth to areas where it will least affect agriculture.
Increasingly, businesses are utilizing ESRI’s system, and similar systems, to display and analyze sales and marketing information before determining where to place branch offices or other facilities.
And the era of computerized mapping has only just begun, industry officials agree. Just about everyone involved in the industry uses terms and phrases like “tremendous,” “staggering” and “exciting new era” when describing the potential of computerized mapping.
Without question, using computerized maps saves time and expense after the initial financial hurdle of installing a system and digitizing existing data.
Electronic scanners can “read” detailed paper maps and create a digitized file, thus saving a laborious process of conversions by hand, which Kas Ebrahim, project manager at Infotec Data Products in Santa Ana, likens to “swimming to Japan.” Under contract with the U.S. Forest Service, Infotec is converting a portion of the agency’s maps to computer tapes.
Government Spending Millions
No one knows exactly how big the digitized market is in the United States. But the biggest map maker of them all, the federal government, is spending millions of dollars converting its maps to computer tapes, often using private companies like Infotec.
The steady erosion in price of computer systems also has accelerated the conversion of paper maps to electronic tape.
ESRI officials said one computer system that the company uses cost $50,000 a few years ago, while an improved version of the same system now sells for $15,000.
Besides saving paper by the ton and making the revision of maps a simple process, converting the map-making and -using process to computer already has made some significant projects possible:
- In Hawaii, ESRI created computerized maps showing fishing zones and yields around Oahu.
- In Arizona, where the Navajo Indians still make jewelry the way they did in ancient times, the tribe’s land management is strictly electronic age. A computerized map at the tribe’s Window Rock headquarters displays property holdings, land records and land and water resources. A data base now being developed will enable the Navajos to use the maps to evaluate requests for drilling and mining permits.
- Hundreds of freight companies are using a system developed by Rand McNally that can calculate mileage and the best routes between any named locations in the United States.
Thomas Bros. Maps, whose street guides are considered necessities by real estate people, cab drivers, news reporters and delivery people throughout California, is automating its map-making process and expects to have digital maps available in a year.
‘On the Brink of a New Era’
“Everything you see in a Thomas guide will be available on computer,” said company spokesman Kris Bonner, who added that the company expects to find a ready market for its computerized maps.
But the most dazzling computerized mapping applications undoubtedly are yet to come.
“We’re right on the brink of a new era of computerized mapping,” said Adolfo Reta, a consultant at Infotec.
Employing technology similar to that used by military pilots to find targets in Libya, car makers are working on systems that will use computerized maps to guide drivers to their destinations. The maps would be displayed on video screens inside cars.
Still, all of this technological wizardry is dependent on the human hand and thus is immensely vulnerable.
In Kenya, for example, ESRI’s system is fully installed but hasn’t flexed its electronic muscles yet because of labor strikes.
“The future in automated cartography is full of tremendously exciting possibilities and a great many frightening pitfalls . . . cost, (and) a willingness of people to accept technological complexity,” said Rand McNally’s Erickson. “It’s fun to talk about Buck Rogers kind of stuff and much of it probably will come to pass. But we have to be . . . skeptical. Some people still have trouble folding a map.”
