The linguistic notions such as very low, low, not low, low or medium are commonly used to name classes in current geographic information systems (GIS). These sorts of linguistic notions are frequently utilised in the social sciences as well. There is little doubt that the social sciences require a formal and even a mathematical framework for handling graded categories with blurred boundaries. In the past decades, much effort has been made to model the kind of fuzziness (or possibility) from the field of mathematics. Geographers and GIS professionals have started to treat this issue since a decade ago. This short article provides detailed discussions with a case study on how to visualise fuzziness, involving colour surfaces, coloured contour lines and 3D model simulation. The author's argument is that effective visualisation of fuzzy boundaries will facilitate the understanding of geographic objects with indeterminate boundaries.
@Article{ jiang:1998:VFBG,
author = {Bin Jiang},
title = {Visualisation of Fuzzy Boundaries of Geographic
Objects},
journal = {Cartography},
year = {1998},
volume = {27},
number = {2},
pages = {41--46},
}