Towards visual summaries of geographic databases based on chorems

Abstract

For many applications, it is very important to get an overview of database contents; and in the case of geographic database, a visual summary can be very helpful for a decision-maker or for any person in charge of a territory. To get such a visual summary, a two-step process is built, first a phase of spatial data mining process extracts geographic knowledge, and a second phase visualizes it by means of chorems – which can be defined as schematized representations of territory. In other words, semantic generalization must be followed by geographic generalization. The scope of this paper is to present the last results of an international project.