Production of Topographic Maps with VGI: Quality Management and Automation

Abstract

The most common way to use geographic information is to make maps. With the ever growing amount of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), we have the opportunity to make many maps, but only automatic cartography (generalisation, stylisation, text placement) can handle such an amount of data with very frequent updates. This chapter reviews the recent proposals to adapt the current techniques for automatic cartography to VGI as the source data, focusing on the production of topographic base maps. The review includes methods to assess quality and the level of detail, which is necessary to handle data heterogeneity. The paper also describes automatic techniques to general-ise, harmonise and render VGI.