NMA’S COLLABORATIONS ON GENERALISATION: THE MAGNET CONSORTIUM
N. Regnauld1, A. Fechir2, F. Lecordix3, D. Rejkjaer4
1 - Ordance Survey, Southampton, Great Britain
2 - Institut Geographique National, Brussels, Belgium
3 - Institut Geographique National, Paris, France
4 - Kort og Matrikelstyrelsen, Copenhagen, Denmark
francois.lecordix@ign.fr
A growing
number of National Mapping Agencies (NMA) have produced topographic vector
databases that they want to exploit to generate a wide range of cartographic
products at different scales. In order to be able to use these data as
efficiently as possible, complex generalisation problems need to be resolved.
Important
research efforts on generalisation have been made during the last 15 years and
many papers have been published on the subject at different conferences, for
instance at the International Cartographic Conference. Research on automatic
generalisation started to deliver some promising solutions, and some commercial
companies started proposing packages dedicated to automatic generalisation. For
example, with the European project AGENT (1997-2000) managed by COGIT
laboratory (IGN France), Laser-Scan proposed a first generalisation prototype
(Barrault, 2001), with the module AGENT in their GIS LAMPS2.
This AGENT
prototype was evaluated for use in production environment by four NMA: Institut
Géographique National (France) (Jahard 2003), Kort
og Matrikelstyrelsen (Denmark)
(West-Nielsen, 2001), Institut Géographique National (Belgium) and
Ordnance Survey (Great Britain). They concluded that the Agent technology was a
promising solution to solve their problems in production, but required
further improvements to be easily usable
in a production environment. The main requirements for improvement were on the
core of the system, to make it more flexible and generic, on the interface, to
be more user friendly and on improving the way the system can be extended (by
means of customer-developed tools) to perform customer-specific tasks.
These four
NMAs also noticed that they have very similar problems, data and objectives.
Working in isolation meant that a lot of similar tools were developed by the
different NMAs, and acquiring knowledge about automating the generalisation
process was a slow learning curve repeated in each organisation. They have
therefore decided to examine the possibility of collaborating on generalisation. A first collaboration was established to share with
Laser-Scan the development cost of a new version of the AGENT prototype, called
Clarity. This new version was available for the four partners in 2003.
The collaboration was pushed to a new
level when the four NMA negotiated and signed in February 2006 an agreement for
sharing software (custom developments) and for coordinating some developments
on Clarity. The collaboration covered by this agreement does not involve any
funding between partners.
This paper will detail this specific
agreement between the MAGNET consortium members and the achievements of the
different partners enabled or made easier by this collaboration.
References
Barrault, M., Regnault, N.,
Duchêne, C. Haire, K., Baeijs, C. Demazeau, Y., Hardy, P., Mackaness, W.,
Ruas, A., Weibel, R. (2001). Integrating Multi-Agent, Object-Oriented and
Algorithmic Techniques For Improved Automated Map Generalization, Proc. Of the
20th International Cartographic Conference, vol. 3, Beijing, China,
2001, pp. 2110-2116.
Jahard, Y., Lemarié, C., &
Lecordix, F. (2003): The implementation of New Technology to Automate Map
Generalisation and Incremental Updatin Processes, Proceedings of the 21st
International Cartographic Conference (ICC), Durban, South Africa.
West-Nielsen, P. (2001):
Generalisation, the Danish Experience. Laser-Scan User Group, June 2001,
Cambridge UK.