Automated map generalization has been a major area of research for decades but has still not reached maturity. Besides the needs for more adaptive algorithms, a fundamental question remains: How can we transfer human generalization knowledge into a computational system more effectively? Previous efforts do not seem capable to fully overcome the “knowledge acquisition bottleneck.” As new theories and technologies emerged in artificial intelligence (particularly deep learning), computers are now able to tackle human-level tasks with superior performance, showing great potential in automated generalization. Meanwhile, crowdsourced geographic information and social sensing is growing at an increasing speed, and the needs for visualizing and analyzing massive geo-referenced data at various scales are numerous. It is therefore necessary to adapt map generalization to these fields. This highlights the potential of applying map generalization in the visual, interactive, and exploratory analysis of abstract (e.g., hierarchical relations) and physical (e.g., movement trajectories) data. This topical collection brings six contributions reporting recent progress and trends in automated generalization in various aspects mentioned above, with which we hope to trigger further discussion and research in our field with new ideas and methodologies.@en

Advanced controls have attracted increasing interests due to the high requirement on smart and energy-efficient (SEE) buildings and decarbonization in the building industry with optimal tradeoff strategies between energy consumption and thermal comfort of built environment. However, a state-of-the-art review is lacking on advanced controls for SEE buildings, especially considering advanced building energy systems, machine learning based advanced controls, and advanced occupant-centric controls (OCC). This study presents a comprehensive review on the latest advancement of advanced controls for SEE buildings, which covers recent research on data collection through smart metering and sensors, big data and building automation, energy digitization, and building energy simulation. Machine learning based advanced controls are comprehensively reviewed, including supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning, together with their roles and underlying mechanisms. In addition, advanced controls for energy security, reliability, robustness, flexibility, and resilience are further reviewed for energy-efficient and low-carbon buildings, with respect to fault detection and diagnosis, fire alarming and building energy safety, and climate change adaptation. Moreover, this study explores the advanced OCC systems and their applications in SEE buildings. Last but not the least, this study emphasizes the challenges and future prospects of the trade-off between complexity and predictive/control performance, AI-based controllers and climate change adaptation, OCC in thermal comfort and energy saving for the SEE buildings. This study offers valuable insights into the latest research progress concerning the underlying mechanisms, algorithms and applications of advanced controls for SEE buildings, paving the path for sustainable and low-carbon transition in building sectors.@en

Integrating updates from timely sources such as volunteered geographic information (VGI) into the spatial data maintained at official agencies is becoming a more demanding requirement but presents many challenges. This paper proposes an approach to addressing the technical challenge of propagating updates from timely sources (e.g. OpenStreetMap) to spatial data maintained at separate map scales. The main idea is to establish a multiple representation database (MRDB) for datasets at different scales and time to facilitate incremental update, where linkages between corresponding objects at different datasets are made explicit. First, two ways in which the timely sources can be integrated into official data for incremental update are discussed. To derive the linkages between different datasets, a data matching procedure based on computer vision is presented and fine-tuned to match data in different scale ranges. Furthermore, the generalization history used to produce smaller scale data from the larger ones in official data is inferred based on the linkages, and is then used to guide the update propagation. Finally, a framework for incremental generalization in MRDBs is proposed, where crucial issues like strategies for update propagation, cartographic generalization, and the so-called ‘chain reaction’ are addressed. The framework is implemented as a fully automated process where operators like simplification, enlargement, compression, displacement and typification are incorporated into the incremental update process. By testing the framework against real world data sets (i.e. OpenStreetMap and official data at 1:10k, 1:50k and 1:100k), we show that the updates are integrated consistently into existing data in terms of spatial relations and cartographic quality. Our work suggests that making use of timely sources by official mapping agencies and companies in a continuous or event-driven data update is technically feasible, with further improvement and extensions discussed.@en