AUTOMATED ANNOTATION IN THE GEBCO DIGITAL ATLAS

The GEBCO series of bathymetric charts of the world's oceans has devel oped over a long time, with many changes in format, content and detail . A digital version, the GEBCO Digital Atlas, is currently under prepa ration using the present (fifth) edition as a starting point. One of t he methods for distribution will be the CD-ROM optical disk. With the potential of this medium for handling considerably more information th an can be portrayed on paper and the use of the electronic medium for mapping applications, a number of cartographic issues are raised, one of which is feature annotation. Research into techniques for carrying out this process automatically has focused almost exclusively on land- based applications. The application of these techniques to bathymetric mapping is discussed, with particular attention paid to the problems involved with viewing data at arbitrary scale factors, and a number of possible solutions are presented.