A real-time generalization and multi-scale visualization method for POI data in volunteered geographic information

With the development of mobile and Web technologies, there has been an increasing number of map-based mashups which display different kinds of POI data in volunteered geographic information. Due to the lack of suitable mechanisms for multi-scale visualization, the display of the POI data often results in the icon clustering problem with icons touching and overlapping each other. This paper introduces a multi-scale visualization method for urban facility POI data by combing the classic methods of generalization and on-line environment. Firstly, we organize the POI data into hierarchical structure by preprocessing in the server-side; the POI features then will be obtained based on the display scale in the client-side and the displacement operation will be executed to resolve the local icon conflicts. Experiments show that this approach can not only achieve the requirements of real-time online, but also can get better multi-scale representation of POI data. ©, 2015, SinoMaps Press. All right reserved.