Automatic generation of route sketches

Abstract

Generating route sketches is a graph redrawing problem, where we are given an initial drawing of a graph G and want to find a new, schematized drawing of G that reduces the drawing complexity while preserving the structural characteristics of the input. The motivation of our work is the visualization of routes in road networks as sketches for driving directions. An important property of a route sketch is that it focuses on road changes and important landmarks rather than exact geography and distances. Typically the start and destination lie in populated areas that are locally reached via a sequence of relatively short road segments. On the other hand, the majority of the route typically consists of long highway segments with no or only few road changes. This property makes it difficult to display driving directions for the whole route in a single traditional map since some areas require much smaller scales than others. The strength of route sketches for this purpose is that they are not drawn to scale but rather use space proportionally to the route complexity. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.