Cartographic label placing based on tabu search heuristic

As a process to find proper positions for annotations, annotation placing has been regarded as a difficult problem in automatic map making. Following accepted cartographic conventions, the objective of a good label placement is to display the geographic position of features with their corresponding text in a clear and harmonious fashion, and having no overlap most important. In this paper, we think that annotation can have two categories by shape. The first is named point locating annotation; the second is named line locating annotation. Both of them can be seen from a combinatorial optimization point of view. Our research first evaluates the heuristic Tabu Search (TS), and then applies this method to cartographic label placement. Lastly, based on an experiment made on 1/250000 topographic data of China, TS has proven to be an efficient choice, with the best performance in quality. And results show that labels of cartographic features almost have no overlap.