Reflections on ‘Line Generalization by Repeated Elimination of Points’

Generalization is common to every map and central to the theory and practice of cartography. What may be termed the 'problem' of generalization, i.e. how to best preserve essential characteristics in the modelling of space, is therefore an important and recurring theme of research published in The Cartographic Journal. The line is probably the most important graphical symbol in the construction of cartographic language. In 1985, Mahes Visvalingam founded the multidisciplinary Cartographic Information Systems Research Group (CISRG) at the University of Hull, with a research agenda largely inspired by the work of Thomas Peucker and his colleagues David Douglas, Nick Chrisman and David Mark. The Douglas-Peucker (DP) algorithm for reducing the number of points in a line was published in 1973, and over the next 20 years, had gained general acceptance as one of the most important and widely used line-simplification algorithms.