Towards a Rule-based Incremental Generalization System

Traditionally, high-resolution geographic data are managed in a base database and coarser resolution databases are produced in an often costly batch generalization process. Kilpeläinen and Sarjakoski (1995) introduced the concept of an incremental generalization environment where previously generalized databases are updated in an incremental way based on the changes to the base database. The paper proposes a rule-based incremental generalization method and discusses important design issues to realise such a system. The system is rule-based in that the generalization rules are expressed in a declarative way in a generalization schema. The rules are utilized both in the batch generalization and in the incremental generalization process.