A Similarity-Based Approach for Improving the Efficiency of Drawing Spatiotemporal Point Features

ABSTRACT

The mapping of spatiotemporal point features plays an important role in geovisualization. However, such mapping suffers from low efficiency due to computational redundancy when similar symbols are used to visualize spatiotemporal point features. This paper presents a similarity-based approach to predict and avoid computational redundancy, which improves mapping efficiency. First, to identify computational redundancy, the similarity of point symbols is measured based on commonalities in symbol graphics and symbol drawing operations. Second, a similarity-enhanced method is proposed to comprehensively predict and avoid computational redundancies when mapping spatiotemporal point features. This approach was tested using two real-world spatiotemporal datasets. The results suggest that the proposed approach offers relatively large performance improvements.

KEYWORDS:

• Similarity
• point symbol
• spatiotemporal point features
• geovisualization pipeline
• computational redundancy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on the contributor

Mingguang Wu is currently a professor at the Department of Geographic Information Science, Nanjing Normal University, China. He has a PhD in Geography and Geographic Information Science from the Information Engineering University, China. His professional skills and interests in cartography are symbol design and spatiotemporal mapping.

ORCID

Kun Zhang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0150-2104

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant Number 41571433; 41271445].