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The Internet provides increasing opportunities for accessing information and on-line services. The government of Canada is restructuring its services to take advantage of this medium. While web-based mapping has been a reality for several years, production of maps for people with special needs poses new challenges, as additional accessibility requirements have to be met. This chapter focuses on web-based tactile and audio-tactile maps for blind and visually impaired users developed within the Mapping for the Visually Impaired project carried out at the Mapping Services Branch in collaboration with other government departments, such as Industry Canada and Transport Canada, conducted within the Canadian Government On-Line initiative (GOL). The GOL — Persons with Disabilities Online — portal involves partnerships among several departments to implement websites specifically tailored to provide information and services for people with special needs, their families, caregivers and service providers. The Mapping for the Visually Impaired (MVI) website is an integral part of this broader initiative providing tactile maps for education, mobility training, transportation and tourism. Moreover, the Web-4-All project carried out by Industry Canada in cooperation with the University of Toronto will further facilitate the development of new interfaces and innovative ways of sharing spatial information, to facilitate learning and improve mobility for blind and visually impaired people. This chapter will discuss users’ needs, present types of maps, which have been incorporated into the Mapping for the Visually Impaired website, and elaborate on theoretical and technical issues when producing and distributing tactile and audio-tactile maps on the Internet.

Decision makers need access to heterogeneous, interdependent and meaningful information to obtain an understanding of the geospatial conditions for informed decision making and analysis of various options for situation assessment. Hypermedia concepts and visualization can facilitate the integration of large amounts of multi-source datasets and provide customized representations of filtered georeferenced data to enable the decision makers to explore and understand various spatial solutions without requiring advanced knowledge of geospatial technologies and systems. A specific application of decision making is the collaborative geospatial decision making, which is based on real-time data sharing, coordinated data access and synchronization between multiple geographically dispersed participants. The roles of hypermedia, visualization and geocollaboration are explored and case studies are presented to support decisions for city planning via interactive mapping, urban planning scenarios, and understanding urban sprawl over time. Two systems are discussed. The in-house developed Dynamic Visualization System (DVS), which dynamically hyperlinks to web map servers, and the GeoConference, a commercial real-time Internet-based geospatial collaborative conference system.

Safety concerns and economic, environmental, scientific, and sustainable development issues require the monitoring and assessment of the various changes that occur in the geographical space. For knowledgebased decision-making and management approaches, spatial change can be better understood through representations, which enhance the cognitive eye-brain process. Work conducted in multiple programs of the Earth Sciences Sector (ESS), Natural Resources Canada is presented. This work aims to develop effective visualization of time-dependent spatial information to assist in the communication and understanding of the various geographic phenomena. Initially, elements and approaches for the effective cartographic representation of spatial changes are discussed. Subsequently, principles for the visualization of change and various modes for change representation are given along with the current web-based technological developments and trends. The visualization concepts and techniques discussed are demonstrated using several examples.

The Territorial Evolution of Canada is one of the early examples of multimedia cartographic applications (Siekierska 1996). The animation of the changes of the boundaries gives a complete, easy to comprehend picture of the territorial evolution within Canada, one which could not be easily visualized from a static map in a conventional cartographic presentation. A hypermedia organization of information permits the user to access it in an intuitive way, guided by interests and previous knowledge of the subject. Multimedia, multi-channel communication facilitates the easy assimilation of large amounts of information, making learning with multimedia products an interesting experience.