The tutorial focuses on the design of map-based hypertext systems. Firstly, the tutorial introduces the concepts of spatial data types with reference to Open Street Map, basic notions of cartography like scale and map themes and an overview of the technologies behind digital maps. The tutorial will provide practical guidelines about the connections between a) user interaction with maps, b) spatial data processing and c) visualisation. Following, the tutorial will walk participants through good and bad practices in the design of interactive maps.

• Human-centered computing → Hypertext / hypermedia.

interactive maps, spatial hypertext

Alessio Antonini. 2023. Design of Map-based Hypertext Systems. In 34th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT ’23), September 4–8, 2023, Rome, Italy. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1 page. https://doi.org/10.1145/3603163.3610530

Maps are among the most ancient knowledge artefacts [6]. The advent of web technologies provided the need and opportunity to rethink these otherwise static systems as interactive tools to be embedded within a wide range of contents and applications. Furthermore, web technologies revolutionised the yet conservative take of desktop geographic information systems (GIS) that provide a digitised version of the classic static approach to cartography. Indeed, web maps provide a new dimension of interactivity and an opportunity to interpret and adapt real-time maps to users, as well as new challenges concerning the usability and legibility of dynamic data and a plurality of uses that are hard to predict. The tutorial focuses on the design of map-based hypertext systems addressing the specific challenges emerging from web technologies and the use of maps in various map-reliant applications. Firstly, the tutorial introduces the concepts of spatial data types with reference to OpenStreetMap peer-review database of geographical entities [3], basic notions of cartography like scale and map

thematization [5, 7] and an overview of the technologies behind digital maps.

• Part 1 - Basics

– 15 min Basic concepts - Spatial data and how maps are generated

– 15 min How interactive maps work and user-generated data

– 15 min User-generated data through map-based interactions

• Part 2 - Design principles

– 15 min Critical analysis of common tools

– 15 min Case study on StoryPlaces [4]

This tutorial will follow the previous work on Foundations of map-based web applications [1] and indexing for interactive maps [2]. It provides practical design guidelines about the connections between a) data generated by user interactions, b) spatial data processing and common user tasks and c) visualisation and communication. Following, the tutorial will walk participants through good and bad practices in the design of interactive maps through a critical analysis of good and bad examples. The tutorial has a duration of 1.5 hours and it does not require previous knowledge about maps or GIS.

A part of the research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement n° 693514 ("WeGovNow"). This work was partially supported by Reading Europe – Advanced Data Investigation Tool (READIT), a project funded by the JPI Cultural Heritage under the European Union Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme (grant agreement No 699523).

[1] Alessio Antonini, Guido Boella, Stefania Buccoliero, Lucia Lupi, and Claudio Schifanella. 2017. Foundations of Map-based Web Applications. In Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2017). 92–99. https://doi.org/10. 5220/0006136600920099

[2] Alessio Antonini, Guido Boella, Stefania Buccoliero, Lucia Lupi, and Claudio Schifanella. 2017. Topology-aware indexing system for urban knowledge. In 2017 Computing Conference. IEEE, 1003–1010.

[3] Mordechai Haklay and Patrick Weber. 2008. Openstreetmap: User-generated street maps. IEEE Pervasive computing 7, 4 (2008), 12–18.

[4] Charlie Hargood, Mark J Weal, and David E Millard. 2018. The storyplaces platform: Building a web-based locative hypertext system. In Proceedings of the 29th on Hypertext and Social Media. 128–135.

[5] Alan M MacEachren. 2004. How maps work: representation, visualization, and design. Guilford Press.

[6] Alexandra Okada, S Buckingham Shum, and Tony Sherborne. 2008. Knowledge cartography. Software Tools and Mapping Techniques (2008).

[7] Dafna Shahaf, Jaewon Yang, Caroline Suen, Jeff Jacobs, Heidi Wang, and Jure Leskovec. 2013. Information cartography: creating zoomable, large-scale maps of information. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining. 1097–1105.