BasqueRoads: A Benchmark for Road Network Selection

workshopInternational audienceRoad network selection is one of the major issues of map generalisation, as new papers are proposed every year sincethe first attempts of automation in the 1990’s (Thomson & Richardson, 1995). New methods are regularly proposedbecause selecting roads for maps at smaller scales is a complex problem. Roads are at the same time present in maps toenable car navigation tasks, and because they are structuring elements that reveal the nature of the landscape (urban,rural, mountainous...). So road selection is not only about retaining the most important roads of the network, but thepreservation of topology and connectivity is essential, as well as the preservation, or the typification of road patterns(e.g. a ring road), and the preservation of local density differences (between urban and rural areas for instance). It is rareto see comparisons of road selection techniques in the literature, because of the lack of open source in mapgeneralisation, but also because of the lack of a common dataset to benchmark these techniques; new propositions onroad selection are most of the time tied to their own dataset and use case. This is why we think that this BasqueRoadsdataset could be useful to advance on this topic of road network selection