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Multihulls: A Technique for Spatial Representation and Processing with Variable Shape Fidelity, Applied to Gazetteers
Author(s) -
Hastings Jordan T.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
transactions in gis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.721
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1467-9671
pISSN - 1361-1682
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9671.2009.01174.x
Subject(s) - georeference , geospatial analysis , geographic information system , computer science , gis applications , geography , convex hull , geocoding , representation (politics) , spatial analysis , geomatics , regular polygon , data mining , cartography , remote sensing , mathematics , geometry , physical geography , politics , political science , law
Spatial processing is increasingly prevalent in the modern computing milieu. In particular, geographic information retrieval and location‐based services such as GoogleEarth and MapQuest depend on spatial operations in conjunction with gazetteers to georeference geographic features. However, many gazetteers contain only point locations or simple bounding rectangles, which make for erratic and sometimes poor georeferencing. Convex hulls can provide better georeferencing results at modest computational cost, but their shape fidelity is still erratic. Full GIS capabilities are actually overfit for many geospatial and georeferencing purposes, because of the limited accuracy of the underlying data. The financial and technical demands of GIS also exclude it from many markets. Described here is a new technique, multihulls, based on the iterative refinement of convex hulls. Multihulls achieve arbitrary shape fidelity at a small increment in computational cost, consistent with the data, outside a GIS, making them attractive for many geospatial and georeferencing applications, especially gazetteers.