Map Design for Public Health Emergencies: a Novel Conceptual Framework for Thematic Content Selection

Public health emergencies always lead to serious consequences which affect a lot on human health and socioeconomic progress. It is essential that governments and regional health commissions guide the public toward self-protection and better arranged social production during epidemic outbreaks and spreads. According to the need of risk communication and information disclosure, existing studies for COVID-19 maps and visualization applications are conducive to predicting the future trend of the pandemic, mitigating the harmful effect on public wellbeing by leading to effective intervention and policy measures. However, unsettled tasks remain on comprehensive organization of risk information, effective expression of data for public requirement, and systematic theoretical framework as a standard of map design for public health emergencies. To close the research gaps, this paper proposes a conceptual framework with a three-dimensional spatiotemporal-logic structure as a theoretical foundation for map thematic content selection, which is also a good basis for determining the effective visualization approaches of map design. It enhances the validity and legibility of the map expression by leading maps’ thematic content couple with features and processes of an epidemic. Then, using the COVID-19 outbreak in Shenzhen, China, as an example, this paper illustrates how to apply the conceptual framework for selecting the thematic content of COVID-19 maps, and explains the specific ways to transform epidemic data into objects for cartographic representation with proper principles and modes. To our knowledge, this paper is the very first study to bring the thematic content of maps for public health emergencies to the fore, and it is thus believed to shed fresh lights into thematic map design.