مقاربة سيميولوجية للتحليل الرسمبياني في الأطلس الجغرافية : تطبيق تقنية المصفوفة التراتبية على مدينة جدة

Abstract EN

The modern digital revolution has had a profound impact on cartographic and graphic techniques and outputs, especially on atlases.

the modern "technological transition" has taken various forms and contributed to the development of digital atlases, because of cartographic automation and intense use of “cad8”, "gis9", and "gisc10".

however, the atlas graphics are still suffering, from the authors’ point of view, from a serious deficiency in semiology, and observing various pitfalls from the user’s perspective.

many graphics are chosen randomly from dedicated software, and some types of graphics are used intensively instead of others, more appropriate.

thus, superposed columns, pie charts or spiral diagrams, are frequent in geographic research, despite their poorness and proven disadvantages.

some lacks depart from design errors, since graphics are presented as means of beautification or decoration and nor as means of communicating messages, from the perspective of their effectiveness and the extent to which they fulfill their basic function of communication.

therefore, we believe that the creators of data, geographers first and other specialists of humanities second, should choose appropriate graphic types and achieve good design, from a scientific-psychological perspective.

this is to facilitate to users the process of reading and understanding graphics, according to the theory of the readability of the graphic image as a rational image before being an artistic one.

the reason is that most graphic products pay more attention to the issues of collecting, analyzing, and presenting data outputs by using (CAD), (GIS) and (GISc), than assimilating and providing useful messages to the widest users’ category, especially when it comes to multiple and long data series.

after presenting the theoretical background of graphic design with regards to the theories of image and communication, the research objectives of this paper are: to review the history and recent evolution of graphic communication; to witness the need of carefulness and objectiveness in choosing appropriate data for the atlases; to find alternative solutions for good design of tedious graphics, based on berlin’s schemes; to facilitate the process of visual perception of symbols; to understand the real graphic messages conveyed by graphics; and to avoid the most important errors in creating and designing graphic data.

the implementation of these objectives is based on a review on Bertin’s heritage semiological techniques and to implement one of these techniques, i.e.

the matrix file in the Jeddah digital atlas project.