USABILITY OF AUTOMATED GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES PLACEMENT
Z. Stachon
Masaryk university, Institute of Geography, Laboratory on
Geoinformatics and Cartography, Brno,
zstachon@gmail.com
Automated placement of geographical names is still one of the most complex problems for cartography, geoinformatics etc., therefore there were many algorithms created and various attitudes applied to this topic in last few years. Final correction of automatically placed geographical names in most cases must be still done by cartographers.
The most of the algorithms are made for points, polylines and polygons, but they do not involve the special needs depending on the topic of the map. There are only some specialized algorithms for street labeling (Chirié, 2000) and diagram labeling (Klau, Mutzel 2003) but in most other fields of science producing maps the algorithms usually failed.
The comparison of placing geographical names by various automated methods and skilled cartographers has been made on different types of maps (topographic, thematic, etc.). This comparison has been made to show how different the results of different automated geographical name placement algorithms and work of skilled cartographers are. Results of this comparison were used to create a set of suggestions for users on how to choose the best way of labeling maps he created.
This paper presents how the existing ways of automated geographical names placement should be used for the labeling according to the topic of the map.