How is margin of error reported on a map?

A rencent journal article I came across discusses exactly what @Aksel in another answer (Sun and Wong, 2010) (It is available here for free online, but that link is void of pictures of the maps as far as I can tell). Essentially they suggest they prefer the overlay approach as opposed to the small multiple approach (i.e. making two maps, one showing the estimate and another showing uncertainty).

Value by alpha maps as have been mentioned on this forum are an alternative way to representing uncertainty than the overlay of the dash lines (which I find more intuitive).

Other works that I have read that may be of interest (although they don't directly answer the question) are;

• Mapping the Results of Geographically Weighted Regression (Mennis, 2006) PDF here
• All maps of parameter estimates are misleading (Gelman, 1999) PDF here
• The original article I cited is Incorporating Data Quality Information in Mapping American Community Survey Data (Sun and Wong, 2010)

I have seen it done on a choropleth with the coloring showing the estimate, and a dotted/hashed overlay representing coefficients of variation. But I have not seen a standard for this.

As pointed out by Andy whiteness blurring is an option. A different option is using some kind of presentation filter: you only show those results which are more certain than a certain threshold. You could provide different maps with different thresholds.

The lowest threshold could be the standard deviation of the whole population (or some very simple model, depending on your data). If a complex map procedure is used with a high uncertainty, large areas may have uncertainties higher than this standard deviation. (depends of course on your variable: for Organic carbon in a soil that statement is true, for visualising eg the error on an elevation map that threshold doesn't make sense at all). Some shameless self promotion: a paper that uses such a technique is: this paper