Social welfare to assess the global legibility of a generalized map

Abstract

Cartographic generalization seeks to summarize geographical information from a geo-database to produce a less detailed and readable map. The specifications of a legible map are translated into a set of constraints to guide the generalization process and evaluate it. The global evaluation of the map, or of a part of it, consisting in aggregating all the single constraints satisfactions, is still to tackle for the generalization community. This paper deals with the use of the social welfare theory to handle the aggregation of the single satisfactions on the map level. The social welfare theory deals with the evaluation of the economical global welfare of a society, based on the individual welfare. Different social welfare orderings are adapted to generalization, compared and some are chosen for several generalization use cases. Experiments with topographic maps are carried out to validate the choices. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.