Towards a scale dependent framework for creating vario-scale maps

Traditionally, the content for vario-scale maps has been created using a ‘one fits all’ approach equal for all scales. Initially only the delete/merge operation was used to create the vario-scale data using the importance and the compatibility functions defined at class level (and evaluated at instance level) to create the tGAP structure with planar partition as basis. In order to improve the generalization quality other operators and techniques have been added during the past years; e. g. simplify, collapse (change area to line representation), split, attractiveness regions and the introduction of the concept of linear network topology. However, the decision which operation to apply has been hard coded in our software, making it not very flexible. Further, we want to include awareness of the current scale when deciding what generalization operation to apply. For this purpose we propose the scale dependent framework (SDF), which at its core contains the encoding of the generalization knowledge in the SDF conceptual model. This SDF model covers the representation of scale dependent class importance, scale dependent class compatibility values, scale dependent attractiveness regions and last but not least specification of generalization operations that are scale and class dependent. By changing the settings in the SDF configuration and re-running the vario-scale generalization process, we can easily experiment in order to find best settings (for specific map user needs). In this paper we design the SDF conceptual model and explicitly motivate and define the scope of its expressiveness. We further present the improved scale dependent tGAP creation software and present initial results in the form of better created vario-scale map content.