Presentation of build-up areas on topographic maps of selected European countries

Abstract

The authors present a comparative analysis of presentation of build-up areas with conventional symbols on 60 civil European topographic maps. The above-mentioned maps are in different scales, from 1:10,000 to 1:100,000, and have been published in nineteen European countries and the autonomous community of Catalonia. The analysis has proved that the scope of characteristics of build-up areas presented on the analysed maps was very diverse, from qualitative and quantitative point of view (e.g. there were between 2 and 25 different categories on 1:10,000 maps). The 1:10,000 and 1:50,000 maps generally contain more information on the characteristics of build-up areas than 1:25,000 maps. The characteristics themselves are also very diversified (e.g. only 6 of them appear on more than half of the analysed maps – most often churches).

Keywords

• topographic maps
• build-up areas
• european topographic maps
• comparative analysis