A New Color Scheme System For Foreground&Background Symbols In Thematic Maps:Design And Evaluation

Color scheme plays an important role in elements expression and visual design in thematic map. It is also a technology which depends on experience of color scheming. Providing color scheme guidelines for thematic map drawing can break obstacles in color scheming for non-professional users or map designers and improve the quality and efficiency of color scheming in thematic mapping.Due to the existing perplexities when choosing a suitable colors macth between foreground point symbols and background base maps, Color Scheme System for Foreground&Background Symbols in Thematic Maps for non-professional users or map designers is designed and developed in this paper. Color schemes are classified based on basic principles of color scheme like complementary colors, contrast colors, adjacent colors and similar colors, and eventually2,436kinds of color schemes have been accomplished which cover colored series and gray series according to theories of color and experience of professional cartographers. In order to simulate the real mapping situation, the system provides dark/bright background choosing, dark/bright gradient choosing and other geographical factors to meet the needs of users.A experiment has been designed in this paper, which is to evaluate whether the Color Scheme System for Foreground&Background Symbols in Thematic Maps owns clear functional orientation and user satisfaction.Assignments have been achieved in this paper as followed:1. Designing color schemes depends on the basic principles of color scheme, and developing Color Scheme System for Foreground&Background Symbols in Thematic Maps based on color schemes;2. Designing and developing Comparison System which is similar to the Color Scheme System for Foreground&Background Symbols in Thematic Maps in interface, yet the color panel is similar to traditional color choosing panel;3. Developing web thematic mapping system using Flex and JavaEE, which enables users to access Comparison System and Color Scheme System for Foreground&Background Symbols in Thematic Maps in network;4. Evaluating the satisfaction of results of thematic mapping through voting in social network platforms, as well as aggregating and analyzing thematic mapping results and timespans. Analyzing the color schemes of the Color Scheme System for Foreground&Background Symbols in Thematic Maps from three aspects as Hue, Value, Saturability.According to the experimental results, We found that the Color Scheme System for Foreground&Background Symbols in Thematic Maps can narrow the range of color selection in thematic mapping, and in the meantime facilitate non-professional users or map designers in professional color scheming, and successfully improve quality and efficiency of color scheming in thematic mapping. We analyze the rules of the color schemes which users have chosen from the Color Scheme System for Foreground&Background Symbols in Thematic Maps. The rules of the color schemes are summed up from three aspects as Hue, Value, Saturability. We found that users like warm tone when they chose the background hue, and gray series are unpopular. The color schemes based on basic principles of contrast colors and similar colors are more popular the adjacent colors and complementary colors.