A method for rapid transmission of multi-scale vector river data via the Internet

Due to the conflict between huge amount of map data and limited network bandwidth, rapid transmission of vector map data over the Internet has become a bottleneck of spatial data delivery in web-based environment. This paper proposed an approach to organizing and transmitting multi-scale vector river network data via the Internet progressively. This approach takes account of two levels of importance, i. e. the importance of river branches and the importance of the points belonging to each river branch, and forms data packages according to these. Our experiments have shown that the proposed approach can reduce 90% of original data while preserving the river structure well