Multihulls: A Technique for SpatialRepresentation and Processing withVariable Shape Fidelity, Appliedto Gazetteers

摘要

Spatial processing is increasingly prevalent in the modern computing milieu. Inparticular, geographic information retrieval and location-based services such asGoogleEarth and MapQuest depend on spatial operations in conjunction withgazetteers to georeference geographic features. However, many gazetteers containonly point locations or simple bounding rectangles, which make for erratic andsometimes poor georeferencing. Convex hulls can provide better georeferencingresults at modest computational cost, but their shape fidelity is still erratic. Full GIScapabilities are actually overfit for many geospatial and georeferencing purposes,because of the limited accuracy of the underlying data. The financial and technicaldemands of GIS also exclude it from many markets. Described here is a newtechnique, multihulls, based on the iterative refinement of convex hulls. Multihullsachieve arbitrary shape fidelity at a small increment in computational cost, consis-tent with the data, outside a GIS, making them attractive for many geospatial andgeoreferencing applications, especially gazetteers.