Experiments in Building an Open Generalisation System

Publisher Summary There is a growing consensus within the map generalization research community that open research platforms will allow closer integration in terms of collaborative research, data abstractions, interoperability of functional components, and the augmentation of geo-spatial applications with generalization capabilities. This chapter describes the authors' experiences in developing systems to support collaborative research in map generalization. The increasing complexity of methods used in generalization research together with growing demands for generalization processing to support a myriad of new geospatial services and technologies has led researchers to investigate how open architectures might better support such changing needs. The chapter explains two such requirements: to share generalization techniques among researchers within the field and to present generalization functionality externally to geographic services. This chapter discusses the issue of openness first in relation to the requirements of the generalization community and then in the broader context of open standards, open architectures, and open sources for geographic information.