AN LP RELAXATION PROCEDURE FOR ANNOTATING POINT FEATURES USING INTERACTIVE GRAPHICS

The development of computer-assisted mapping procedures has made the design of maps a normative problem in the pro cessing and communication of information. However, mathe matical programming techniques have rarely been used by cartographers in the optimal design of maps. Instead, heur istics have been employed. A modified linear programming technique is used here to operationalize the annotation of Doint features. An interactive relaxation procedure is utilized to avoid the problem of having to define algebraic ally the set of cartographic restrictions on the placement of labels. Because all constraints in the point annotation problem are graphic in nature, any violated constraint in the relaxed problem can be visually detected on a screen image. The viewer interactively adds violated constraints to the algebraic problem until no violations appear on the screen image. This approach is promising as many carto graphic rules are partially qualitative and human inter action is an appropriate method to resolve conflicts.