Due to the success of navigation
devices and smartphones, digital maps are used widely in everyday life. They
guide us safely along motorways or to the next bakery as long as the map is
good and clear. However, representation of many information items on small,
mobile screens is not trivial. At the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT),
computer scientists have now developed a method to ensure mathematically
optimal adaptation of the labeling to the perspective and driving direction. Researchers,
focus on mathematically exactly geovisualization.
By means of the mathematical
description of digital maps, the difficulty of the problem can be estimated
first. For example, maximization of the number of labelings in the selected
image section of the navigation device along a route is one of the mathematical
problems, the so-called NP-complete problems that require most of the computing
time. When increasing the number of objects in the map, the required computing
capacity grows exponentially and computing capacity quickly reaches its limits,
especially on mobile devices.
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