Journal of the Korean Geographical Society ISSN:1225-6633(Print) 대한지리학회지

Many cartographers have for many years searched for a way to construct cartograms in which the sizes of geographic areas such as states, counties or census tracts are rescaled in proportion to their population or some other socio-economic properties. While many techniques and algorithms for creating cartograms have been proposed, some of them are still extremely complex to generate in a proper manner, and many of them suffer either from this lack of readability or from seamless integration with GIS software. This paper, therefore, presents a simple population cartogram technique based on the Circular Cartogram Algorithm(CCA) by Dorling(1996) to tackle these drawbacks by drawing the areas as simple circles for use as a base map and linking the construction with GIS mapping processes. For an automated approach in the cartogram generation, this paper proposes a close coupling method of ArcView GIS 3.3. package in order for users to access to the cartogram algorithm. Then, they will be available through an interface that the ArcView GIS system allows user-written routines to be accessed easily. The CCA and its coupling architecture ensure to improve the potential applicability of the use of cartograms to census mapping at practical levels. As the cartogram examples, cartograms of population and property types in 2005 Korea census data sets are illustrated in the end, by which viewers can easily identify the residential concentration and their relative ratio in Seoul metropolitan area.