A practical technique to solve settlements overlapping roads problem in map generalization

In the representation of topographic data, principles existing in physical worlds should be respected. For instance, a river should flow along a thalweg; likewise, a building should keep a certain distance away from a road. The violation of these principles is called inconsistency (or conflicts). In order to keep geospatial data consistent in topographic databases, conflict detection and solving is required. Nowadays, as map generalization is more frequently applied in GIScience than ever, conflicts arising from map generalization have attracted more concerns accordingly. We aimed at solving the conflicting problem of a building overlapping a road after map generalization in this paper. First, research work in some literature related to inconsistency in the process of map generalization is summarized. Then, a morphing technique based practical solution to the aimed problem is proposed. Third, the proposed strategy and algorithm are tested on some experimental spatial data. At last, results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of handling conflicts of a building overlaps a road practically, which resulted from map generalization, and providing a promising solution other than displacement based methods.