Ninth International Cartographic Conference Washington USA 1978

Abstract

In the last years a wide series of automatic procedures have been developed for the capture, storage, analysis and retrieval of geographically referenced data with the principal purpose of satisfying the information and analysis needs generated in the decision –making process, mainly for the land use planning, urban space and natural resources management. The aims of all these systems are similar to those of the conventional cartographic methods’ to facilitate the knowledge of the spatial phenomena. But, today the need for handle a great number of data, the fast evolution of their characteristics, the increasing shift from descriptive to quantitative analysis methods, have made dearly insufficient the conventional cartography in the spatial analysis.