Information Cartography: Using GIS for Visualizing Non-Spatial Data

In 1982 Howard White and Belver Griffith proposed using authors as markers of "intellectual space" (White and Griffith, 1982). Since then, many in information science have made use of the metaphor between points in a real-world Cartesian coordinate system and points in abstract information spaces. "Spaces" now may be prefixed by the intellectual subtopic, such as cyberspace, conceptual space, document space, information space, and so on. The common theme here is that of representing objects of information spatially--as maps. This leads to old issues of how to organize or structure the information to meet the pragmatic navigation needs of the information traveler, researcher, or adventurer, while retaining familiarity, orientation, and accuracy.