Who owns the Map Legend

Introduction are media in cartographic or digital formats. Communication occurs mainly by way of symbols that need to be interpreted via the map legend and its graphic vocabulary. Lacking universal standards, each map has its own visual language. This language--or enough of it--has to be common property in order for communication of any kind to take place. This ad hoc language has become increasingly important since maps have been used in the contexts of interactive processes aimed at bridging barriers among stakeholders having different backgrounds, perspectives, and communication patterns. Intellectual ownership of such language and the content of knowledge that it communicates, are critical factors in determining the success of the processes to which mapping and maps are put. Based on literature review and case studies done in developing countries in the contexts of participatory planning and territorial negotiations, this paper analyzes the roles of the legend--and the processes that lead to its composition--in determining the intellectual ownership of spatial information visualised in the form of maps. Mapping And Participatory Processes Historical Perspective Mapping is fundamental way for displaying spatial human cognition. It is representational medium that both has history and is part of the practice of history. (Herrington 2003) For centuries and increasingly with the advent of Geographic Information Technologies and Systems (GIT&S), graphic representations of part or the whole of Earth in cartographic, electronic, 2- or 3-dimensional formats have been playing significant roles as media (Sui and Goodchild 2001) used to store, display, and convey information, and as basis of analysis and decision making. In the past, maps have been made primarily to serve precise tasks, such as describing discoveries, navigating space, defining boundaries, registering ownership, and locating resources. In the early 1990s, Monmonier (1996, 2) wrote that a single map is one of an indefinitely large number of graphical models of the spatial aspects of reality that might be produced for the same situation or from the same data. Changes have occurred since GIT&S have increasingly become accessible to civil society and graphic representations of space have been used as channels for two-way communication purposes to support social learning, dialogue, and negotiation processes. In March 2004, more than 200 representatives from indigenous groups attended the International Forum on Indigenous Mapping in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, sharing the motto: Maps are more than pieces of paper. They are stories, conversations, lives and songs lived out in place, and are inseparable from the political and cultural contexts in which they are used. (Warren 2004) The participatory use of maps started in the late 1980s. At that time, development practitioners were inclined to adopt PRA sketch mapping tools (Mascarenhas 199 1) rather than venturing into more complex, demanding, and time-consuming scale mapping. This was because preference was given to eliciting village dynamics and to facilitating communication between insiders and outsiders (researchers), rather than to courses of action enabling communities to interact efficiently with policy makers. In addition, in many developing countries, aerial photography, satellite imagery, and official, large-scale topographic maps were under governmental control and their access restricted because of national security concerns. The situation changed in the 1990s, with the diffusion of modern GIT&S including geographic information systems (GIS), low-cost global positioning systems (GPS), remote sensing image analysis software, open access to data via the Internet, and the steadily decreasing cost of hardware. Spatial data, previously controlled by government institutions became progressively more accessible to and mastered by non-governmental and community-based organisations, minority groups, and sectors of society traditionally disenfranchised by maps and marginalized from decision-making processes (Fox 2003). …

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