Research Project: SucaP

Strategi urban area aggregation and caricature project

The Institute of Geography of the University of Heidelberg, Chair of GIScience and Ordnances Survey Research have teamed up to investigate new techniques for the generalisation of urban area polygons for medium scale vector datasets from large scale data.

Medium scale datasets and maps, such as Strategi or the JOG provide regional overviews of selected topographic elements. They often include aggregate objects that solely exist as a function of their scale, such as urban regions. They consist of a plethora of geoobjects, their selection aggregation and geometric manipulation are the most pertinent tasks for their automated generalisation.

In the past, medium scale datasets have been the first to be made accessible and open to the public in vector format. This trend continues, making automated production techniques crucial in keeping the publicly available datasets up to date.

Ordnance Survey is one of the global leaders in automated geodata generalisation research and practice. Together with the expertise in polygonal shape schematization and cartographic analysis of the GIScience group from Heidelberg, new and efficient algortithms providing reproducible results are the goal of this project.