»Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it's essential. To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or a video screen, a map must distort reality.« (Mark Monmonier (19962): How to lie with maps, p.1)
Cartography is defined as the discipline dealing with the conception, production, disseminaion and study of maps. It concers the art, science and techniques of making maps and charts. (taken from course-slides)
A map is a symbolised image of geographical reality, representing selected features or characteristics , resulting from the creative effort of its author's execution of choices, and is designed for use when spatial relationships are of primary relevance. Maps can never be impartial. Bceause they are made by humans and the map producer's perception of his or her environment will always have an influence on the final result. But this does not mean that maps are unreliable. They are highly effective storage mechanisms, a highly effective way of summarizing and communicating results of GIS analysis to a broad audience and they are very important decision support tools.
The following example is the final assignment for the course 'cartography & geovisualization' in the summer-term 2011. It illustrates all regularely operated routes from and to Salzburg Airport for the year 2009 by seasonality and passenger-numbers. To be considered 'regular', a route has to be operated at least one time a week for a period of five weeks. The map features a quite simple base map in grey color with austria being highlighted in dark grey color. The idea behind this quite simple color scheme is to focus the user's attention to the essential. A colored map with topographic information would look too fussy. Routes which are only operated in the winter-months are colored blue, routes which are only operated during the summer-period are colored orange and routes which are operated all year round a colored white.
The results have also been published in this blog: destinationenkarte.blogspot.co.at/