Cartographic knowledge acquisition: From practice to theory

This paper firstly provides a brief overview of expert systems and their application in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with a particular emphasis on cartographic knowledge capture. Later, the paper describes the process of a heuristic natural knowledge transfer from cartographers for building an artificial intelligence system using an international Cartographic Generalisation Survey at several national and state mapping agencies as well as a number of geospatial software vendors, the survey results are utilised for defining the basis for a knowledge-based expert system.