Quality assessment for polygon generalization
Quality Aspects in Spatial Data Mining, chapter 16, CRC Press, Boca Raton, USA, (2007)Abstract
Different methods for map generalization have been developed. However, there are only a few publications that discuss the automatic quality assessment of generalized maps. This problem becomes crucial when the usefulness of a map has to be evaluated or different methods need to be compared, e.g. to find the best algorithm for a specific application. In this paper we present a new approach for the quality assessment of generalized polygons. In particular the simplification of buildings and the generalization of polygons that represent land use in a topographic database are discussed. Our approach distinguishes between two aims of generalization: Reducing the amount of data and keeping the map similar to the input map. A measure of quality that defines a compromise between these conflicting objectives is introduced. The proposed method was tested for a German cadastral data set and the official German topographic database ATKIS.