Applications of cartographic structure matching

Automatic categorization of large-scale topographic vector data into roads, buildings and similar classes typically examines each object description in isolation. We describe a cartographic structure matching (CSM) algorithm that automatically classifies objects in topographic maps by examining the context of the object. Matching clusters of objects against known templates serves to categorize ambiguous polygons by including context in the categorization process. We describe a number of applications that emerged from the core structure-matching algorithm, addressing problems of error detection, rejoining partitioned objects, composite object identification and data quality estimation.