Map Labeling and Its Generalizations

Map labeling is of fundamental importance in cartography and geographical information systems and is one of the areas targeted for research by the ACM Computational Geometry Impact Task Force. Previous work on map labeling has focused on the problem of placing maximal uniform, axis-aligned, disjoint rectangles on the plane so that each point feature to be labeled lies at the corner of one rectangle. Here, we consider a number of variants of the map labeling problem. We obtain three general types of results. First, we devise constant-factor polynomial-time approximation algorithms for labeling point features by rectangular labels, where the feature may lie anywhere on the boundary of its label region and where labeling rectangles may be placed in any orientation. These results generalize to the case of elliptical labels. Secondly, we consider the problem of labeling a map consisting of disjoint rectilinear line segments. We obtain constant-factor polynomial-time approximation algorithms for the general problem and an optimal algorithm for the special case where all segments are horizontal. Finally, we formulate a bicriteria version of the map-labeling problem and provide bicriteria polynomial-time approximation schemes for a number of such problems