Abstract
Cartographic generalisation involves interaction between individual operators concerned with processes such as object elimination, detail reductions amalgamation, typification and displacement. Effective automation of these processes requires a means of maintaining knowledge of the spatial relationships between map objects in order to ensure that constraints of topology and of proximity are obeyed in the course of the individual generalisation transformations. Triangulated spatial models, based on the constrained Delaunay triangulation, have proven to be of particular value in representing the proximal and topological relations between map objects and hence in performing many of the essential tasks of fully automated cartographic generalisation. These include the identification of nearby objects; determination of the structure of space between nearby objects; execution of boundary simplification, merge and collapse operations; and the detection and resolution, by displacement, of topological inconsistencies arising from individual operators. In this paper we focus on the use of a triangulated model for operations specific to execution of merge operations between areal objects. The model is exploited to identify the regions of space between nearby objects and to execute merge operations in which the triangulation is used variously to adopt intervening space and to move adjacent rectangular objects to touch each other. Methods for updating the triangulation are described.
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Ware, J.M., Jones, C.B., Bundy, G.L. (1995). A triangulated spatial model for cartographic generalisation of areal objects. In: Frank, A.U., Kuhn, W. (eds) Spatial Information Theory A Theoretical Basis for GIS. COSIT 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 988. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60392-1_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60392-1_12
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