Automated Name Placement With High Cartographic Quality: City Street Maps

As maps are more and more frequently produced from geographic databases using mapmaking software there is an increasing need for automated cartography. In particular, much research into automated name placement has been done, yielding systems that produce useful results but do not rival classical cartography. An automated street name placement program is proposed in this paper, which yields cartographic quality comparable to that obtained by traditional cartographers. We improved the modeling of cartographic rules in quantity and quality by addressing all the rules about street names, and analyzing each rule in detail. The program implements a mathematical model of these cartographic rules, and uses procedural programming. The results show that one type of traditional paper map can be produced using automated name placement.