Map Labeling Sites

Benchmarks

• Various random and real-world data sets for point labeling collected by Alexander Wolff
• Point-labeling data collected by Luiz Antonio Nogueira Lorena
• 13206 points in Switzerland - 20 instances with different label sizes, collected by Éric Taillard.

Software

• Maplex, a rule-based label-placement tool for high-quality maps. A research team led by Christopher Jones at the University of Wales at Glamorgan started the implementation of Maplex, see [JC89, Jon89, Jon90]. Later, development was continued by a commercial company. In 1998, Maplex was bought by ESRI, one of the big GIS companies.
• Evername - cartographic label-placement software on top of MapInfo.
• Maptext - cartographic label-placement software for all major GIS.
• An Applet that dynamically demonstrates the evolution strategy suggested by Mike Preuss in his Master's thesis [P98].
• MicroImages has a map and image processing system called TNTmips. It includes automatic label placement. They compare this to what you can do with a GIS by MapInfo.
• Spatialprojects has three MapInfo products. According to Phil Waight they have the following features:
  1. Polylabel provides curved feature labelling of polylines or polygons. It is a little different from static labelling tools in that the label expression dynamically checks
     • for valid display scale limits, turning individual labels off outside these limits and
     • label spacing based on string length, polyline segmentation and display scale
     • computes label repeat details (along the length of a polyline), ideal for "active" map usage.
  2. spCarto performs balanced labelling of street layers as its primary goal, but has many "cartographic" rules for improving the appearance of "active", printed or web street maps.
  3. spatialSQL is more of a tool box, but includes:
     • visual centroid calculation for polygons for better label placement
     • very complete geometric properties of polygons for aligned labelling (principal axes, moments of inertia)
     • rules for polygon centroid and frontage labelling
     • multi-layer label clash resolution, which checks for label-label and label-feature clashes (using a greedy algorithm)
     • uses an SQL iterative "intersect and update" method to resolve clashes.
• Caliper has a GIS system called Maptitude that according to them has extensive labeling capabilities.

Projects

• Label Placement for Screen Maps in Real Time by the Institute for Cartography and Geoinformation at the University of Bonn
• Excentric Labeling for Information Visualization by the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland
• Force Directed Map Labeling of the Algorithms and Data Structures Group at the Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms, TU Wien
• Adaptive Labeling for Illustrations at the Department of Simulation and Graphics, University Magdeburg