Mosaic Drawings and Cartograms

• Published in: Computer graphics forum Vol. 34; no. 3; pp. 361 - 370
• Main Authors: Cano, R. G., Buchin, K., Castermans, T., Pieterse, A., Sonke, W., Speckmann, B.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2015
• Subjects: Algorithms; Analysis; Cartography; Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS); Computer graphics; Construction; Data analysis; Graphs; Hexagons; I.3.3 [Computer Graphics]: Picture/Image Generation-Line and curve generation; Image processing systems; Mosaics; Studies; Tiles
• ISSN: 0167-7055; 1467-8659
• DOI: 10.1111/cgf.12648

Cartograms visualize quantitative data about a set of regions such as countries or states. There are several different types of cartograms and – for some – algorithms to automatically construct them exist. We focus on mosaic cartograms: cartograms that use multiples of simple tiles – usually squares or hexagons – to represent regions. Mosaic cartograms communicate well data that consist of, or can be cast into, small integer units (for example, electorial college votes). In addition, they allow users to accurately compare regions and can often maintain a (schematized) version of the input regions’ shapes. We propose the first fully automated method to construct mosaic cartograms. To do so, we first introduce mosaic drawings of triangulated planar graphs. We then show how to modify mosaic drawings into mosaic cartograms with low cartographic error while maintaining correct adjacencies between regions. We validate our approach experimentally and compare to other cartogram methods.