Digital map conflation: a review of the process and a proposal for classification

Abstract

This article is centred on analysing the state of the art of the conflation processes applied to geospatial databases (GDBs) from heterogeneous sources. The term conflation is used to describe the procedure for the integration of these different data, and conflation methods play an important role in systems for updating GDBs, derivation of new cartographic products, densification of digital elevation models, automatic features extraction and so on. In this article we define extensively each conflation process, its evaluation measures and its main application problems and present a classification of all conflation processes. Finally, we introduce a bibliography which the reader may find useful to further explore the field. It tries to serve as a starting point and direct the reader to characteristic research in this area.

Keywords:

• conflation
• data fusion
• data integration
• interoperability
• accuracy

Acknowledgements

This work has been partially funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Spain under Grant No. BIA2003-02234 and by the Regional Ministry of Innovation, Science and Enterprise of Andalusia (Spain) under Grant No. P08-TIC-4199.

The authors also acknowledge the Regional Government of Andalusia (Spain) for their constant financial support since 1997 to their research group (Ingeniería Cartográfica, Code TEP-164).