SOCIAL WORK ASSESSMENT

Social Work Assessment

Social Work Assessment

Social Work Assessment Tool for a Road Map

The capacity to comprehend the physical world depends on the capacity to model it. Given the complex interplay of multi-scale processes (both human and physical), it is critical that people should model it at multiple levels of detail and that they need to have the capacity to understand and model the interaction of these processes between scales. In many respects, a map is a model: Within a set of constraints, it seeks to reveal scale-dependent patterns that arise from the complex interplay of those processes. Traditionally, it has been the preserve and responsibility of the cartographer to abstract and visualize the world in all its forms, at various levels of detail, both topographic and thematic. (Buttenfield, 1991, pp.140-165) Attempts to automate the cartographic design process (the craft and the science of the human hand) have highlighted the complexity and challenges of modeling and visualizing the world. This task has been made even more complex as a result of the introduction of technology that has created a fundamental paradigm shift in how people use, explore, and interact with geographic information. Where once the map reflected all that people knew, now the digital image has become a looking glass to the digital database—one that stores geographies of the world, at multiple levels of detail, and supports functionality far beyond that of the static page. It is this paradigm shift that has spawned new visualization methodologies and exploratory data analysis techniques. However technology has not obviated the need for good design, that is to say, efficient and effective ways of conveying as many ideas as possible, in the shortest time and with the least amount of ink—both beautifully and hideously illustrated in the books of Tufte. Attempts to mimic the cartographic hand have had mixed success. Various approaches (most recently, agent-based modeling) have tried to deal with the fact that design is a complex decision-making process. People need the “eyes of the cartographer” to evaluate designs, and various cartometric techniques have been developed to measure content, generate candidate designs, and evaluate map output. Ideas concerned with data modeling and database design have gravitated toward the concept that people should store and maintain geographic information at the finest level of detail and, through the process of generalization, create multiple representations at different scales (i.e., multiple levels of detail). (Walker, 1989, pp.121-140)

This paradigm has replaced ideas that echo past approaches to map series production—in which a set of independent databases were created, each of a predefined and fixed scale, each requiring its own maintenance and update. The new model is one in which updates are made once, and if the right multi-scale model underpins the data model, any change at the fine scale can automatically “trickle through” the smaller scales, making changes and updates where necessary. This entry expands on conventional approaches to automated mapping, beginning with a discussion of model and cartographic ...