Challenges for Automated Generalisation at European Mapping Agencies: A Qualitative and Quantitative Analysis

The automation of generalisation is an important issue at National Mapping Agencies (NMAs) to reduce data production costs and to improve data maintenance. This paper presents the challenges for automated generalisation at European NMAs integrating a qualitative and quantitative analysis. The qualitative analysis focuses on the current strategies for automated generalisation at NMAs. The quantitative analysis extends these findings and measures the status of automated generalisation functionality at NMAs using the required and missing generalisation operators as indicators. The results are interesting for the research community, the software vendors and NMAs to streamline their efforts to accomplish full automation of generalisation processes.