State-of-the-art of automated generalisation in commercial software

This report presents the EuroSDR research project that studied the state-of-the-art of automated generalisation in commercial software in a collaboration between National Mapping Agencies (NMAs), research institutes and vendors. The aims of the study were to learn more about generic and specific map requirements of NMAs, to show possibilities and limitations of commercial generalisation software, and to identify areas for further developments based on latest research advances. The project consisted of three main steps: requirements analysis, testing, and evaluation. The requirement analysis (carried out between Oct 2006 till June 2007) resulted in four representative test cases, formalised and harmonised NMA map specifications for automated generalisation as well as an analysis of the defined specifications that shows the similarities and differences between map specifications of different NMAs. Between June 2007 and Spring 2008 tests were performed by project team members (from NMAs and research institutes) on out-of-the-box versions of four generalisation systems: ArcGIS (ESRI), Change/Push/Typify (University of Hanover), Radius Clarity (1Spatial) and axpand (Axes Systems). At the same time the vendors (except Axes systems) carried out tests with the same test cases with improved and/or customised versions of their systems. The tests resulted in 35 outputs consisting of 700 thematic layers, where it should be noted that the effort for one test was approximately 1 week. The evaluation, carried out between summer 2008 and spring 2009, consisted of an evaluation of meta aspects (based on information recorded by the testers) and of an evaluation of the generalised datasets themselves. The latter evaluation consisted of three parts that completed each other: a) automated constraint-based evaluation, b) evaluation which visually compared different outputs for one test case and c) a qualitative evaluation by cartographic experts. From the project results it can be conclu
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