The
Stroke Concept in Geographic Network

Generalization and Analysis

Robert C. Thomson
The Robert Gordon University, School of Computing,
St. Andrew St., Aberdeen, UK; email: rcthomson@yahoo.com

Abstract
Strokes are relatively simple linear elements readily perceived in a network. Apart from their role as graphical elements, strokes reflect lines of
flow or movement within the network itself and so constitute natural functional units. Since the functional importance of a stroke is reflected in its
perceived salience this makes strokes a suitable basis for network generalization, through the preferential preservation of salient strokes during data
reduction. In this paper an exploration of the dual functional-graphical nature of strokes is approached via a look at perceptual grouping in generalization. The identification and use of strokes are then described. The
strengths and limitations of stroke-based generalization are discussed; how
the technique may be developed is also considered. Finally, the functional
role of strokes in networks is highlighted by a look at recent developments
in space syntax and related studies.
Key words: network, generalization, perceptual grouping, continuity,
space syntax

1 Introduction
The automatic generalization of geographic networks can be viewed, at its
simplest, as the progressive removal of segments in a principled fashion.
For the generalization to be effective there are two goals to be achieved.

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First, the reduction should preserve as far as possible the important features of the network where the definition of importance will be context
dependent, and may involve linkages with other networks and various nonnetwork contextual data. Second, the visual character of the network map
should be preserved where possible.
In some situations the two goals may be essentially the same. This paper
argues that when no semantic information about a network map is available then the perceived importance of elements will correlate strongly with
their perceptual salience. It follows that network features that combine
both functional importance within the network and perceptual salience in
the map representation should be preferentially retained in generalization.
Strokes are relatively simple network elements of this type. Strokes are
computationally simple to derive from network data, and generalization
based on strokes has been found to effective in several contexts. This paper
reviews the use of strokes in generalization with the broad aim of clarifying their dual functional/graphical nature and how these properties support
their role in effective generalization.
Aims and Structure. First perceptual grouping and its role in generalization are discussed. The procedures implemented at the Atlas of Canada for
extracting strokes and using them in generalization will then be briefly described, noting how it is sometimes possible to adjust their functional or
graphical roles in a generalization. Stroke-based network generalization
and other analyses are then described. The strengths and the limitations of
the stroke-based approach are discussed, and how the latter are being addressed. A final section considers the relationship between space syntax
and network generalization. It will be shown that the functional role of
strokes in networks is highlighted by recent developments in space syntax,
and that space syntactic measures can be used to support stroke-based generalization.
The material presented here deepens, extends and updates the discussion
of strokes, which formed one part of a recent, broader review of geographic network generalization (Thomson and Brooks 2006). In particular,
the discussion of perceptual grouping has been revised to clarify the dual
nature of the stroke and to place the use of strokes in a wider context of the
search for patterns in networks that should be preserved in generalization;
review material has been updated, and extended to consider applications of
strokes outside generalization; a new section has been added examining
links between strokes, generalization and space syntax analysis of road and
street networks.

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2 Perceptual Grouping
When looking at maps of road or river networks, natural linear elements
will be seen which extend through junctions. These elements were termed
strokes (Thomson and Richardson 1999), prompted by the idea of a curvilinear segment that can be drawn in one smooth movement and without a
dramatic change in line style. Strokes are paths of good continuation: they
move through the network with no abrupt change in direction or character
at junctions. Any geographic network can be completely decomposed into
strokes. According to map type, the longer strokes present could be expected to represent the main courses of rivers or major routes; shorter
strokes could be expected to represent tributary streams or minor roads.
Implications about fundamental relations among these elements follow
from their perceived saliences. A longer and smoother stroke will naturally
appear more important than one shorter and more meandering. Also, one
stroke may terminate against another with implications of occlusion, tribute and less importance. The resulting perceived salience is a useful indication of the relative functional importance in the network of the features
represented by these elements. Simply put, roads or rivers that look important in a network map usually are important. And saying that a stroke
looks important is in effect saying it is a salient perceptual group.
Perceptual grouping is fundamental to human vision. Even with no high
level or semantic knowledge available, the human visual system spontaneously organizes elements of the visual field, resulting in the perception of
groups: Some arrangements of picture elements will tend to be seen as belonging together in natural groups, which often appear to stand out from
the surrounding elements, i.e. as figures against grounds. Many perceptual grouping principles have been identified, such as proximity, similarity,
symmetry, uniform density, closure, parallelism, collinearity, cotermination and continuity (Wertheimer 1938).

(a)

(b)

Fig. 1. A simple network with 8 arcs and 9 nodes resolves (a) into 4 strokes (b)

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Figure 1 illustrates the principle of continuity or good continuation: the

figure is naturally perceived as four smooth curves the longest curve is
crossed by one curve, and with two shorter curves incident on it. The four
curves perceived are the strokes of this small network. In the arc-node data
model this network would be represented by eight arcs and nine nodes.
Figure 2 shows a scatter of line segments in which several grouping
principles can be seen to operate: the parallelism of four segments, the
collinearity of others, the co-termination of four segments and some less
well defined closed loops of segments. These latter groups can arise from
simple proximity of their constituent line segments without touching.

Fig. 2. A scatter of line segments showing perceptual groups of collinearity,

co-termination and parallelism

Perceptual grouping is a fundamental component of perceptual organization the ability of a visual system to spontaneously organize detected
features in images, even in the absence of high level or semantic knowledge (Palmer 1983; Witkin and Tenenbaum 1983; Lowe 1987). These
principles are recognized as the basis for parsing the visual world into surfaces and objects according to relatively simple visual characteristics, in a
process that operates independently of the domain being represented. Their
importance in map interpretation (MacEachren 1995) and generalization
(DeLucia and Black 1987) has also long been recognized.
The assumption that line-drawing recognition is a learned or cultural
phenomenon is not supported by the evidence (Lowe 1987). The mechanisms being used for line drawing or map understanding have presumably
developed from their use in recognizing three-dimensional scenes. The
role of perceptual organization in vision is to detect those image groupings
(such as those of Fig. 2) that are unlikely to have arisen by accident of
viewpoint or position. These image groupings therefore indicate probable

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685

similar groupings in the scene (Lowe 1987). An important part of scene

understanding is the recognition of occlusion, where one object is partly
obscured by another. This is achieved using the same grouping principles,
with the principle of good continuation applied to object/region boundaries. This was demonstrated in a study of a domain presenting analogous
problems of interpretation (Thomson and Claridge 1989).
The idea that perceptual groups in maps indicate important phenomena
in the world being represented is backed up by the findings of Zhang
(2004a), who sought characteristic higher-level network patterns, and of
Heinzle et al. (2005), who sought patterns in road networks that could indicate useful implicit or more complex information about the network. All
the patterns they identified are instances of one or more perceptual grouping principles. The patterns (and main principles) are: star-like hubs (cotermination), parallel structures (parallelisms), grid-like patterns (parallelism, symmetry), loops (closure), density differences (uniform density).
Thus strokes, like other perceptual groups, are not simply graphical entities but carry implications of the probable presence of some notable phenomenon. Strokes are lines of good continuation in a network map, reflecting likely good continuation in the physical network paths of natural
movement of traffic or water, as applicable.
Yet strokes, like other perceptual groups, are important graphical elements. It has been suggested (Thomson and Brooks 2002) that the character of a map is a function of the perceptual groups it contains, and that consequently, during generalization, the preservation of salient perceptual
groups although necessarily in some attenuated form should help retain
that character. In a stroke-based generalization of a geographic network the
more perceptually salient strokes are retained preferentially, and so may be
expected to produce results that preserve important aspects of network
character. If the generalization does not consider higher-order perceptual
groups, however, these patterns may be lost from the map, with consequent loss of character.

3 Stroke-based Generalization
The methods of stroke-based generalization used at the Atlas of Canada
have previously been described and illustrated (Thomson and Brooks
2000, 2002; Brooks 2003). The key steps are stroke building and stroke
ordering.

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3.1 Stroke Building

In the implementation used at the Atlas of Canada, stroke building is a local process, considering each node in turn and dependent completely on
the properties of the network at that node neighborhood. This implies that
strokes can be locally adjusted, with the update requiring only small processing time. The stroke-building algorithm is very efficient. Measured
computational efficiency in practice appears to be approximately linear in
the number of nodes.
At each node, a decision is made as to which (if any) incident pairs of
arcs should be connected together. The simplest criterion to use is the angle of deflection that the join would imply. However, if other attribute data
for the road or river segments are available then much more sophisticated
processing is possible, with a rule base used to facilitate control of the
concatenation. The rule set is the key to tuning strokes for a given application. The rules can be arbitrarily complex, with fallback rules to deal with
cases unresolved by the primary rules.
Thomson and Brooks (2000) and, in greater detail, Brooks (2003) describe procedures for river networks where strokes equivalent to the main
streams required by Horton ordering are derived but with a greater flexibility that allows subsequent generalization results to be close to that of a
human cartographer.
When processing road networks many road attributes may be available
for use in stroke building. Road junctions themselves may also have associated relevant information. For example it may be possible to classify
junctions as urban or rural, and then different rule sets can be applied for
the different cases for example, different limits may be set on acceptable
angles of deflection. When road class information is available for arcs then
generally better continuation is achieved by letting continuity of class
override continuity of direction. Linking arc pairs with suitable continuity
of direction can be restricted to those pairs with identical or similar road
class. This eliminates problems such as a major road bending where a minor road joins it at an angle that would give a smoother continuation of direction between major and minor roads than between major and major.
Introducing a rule where continuation of road/street name at a junction
was given precedence over continuity of direction was also found to yield
good results. It was felt that street name continuity was a safer indicator of
a natural functional network unit. Where such information is missing or
incomplete, the strokes will be built according to geometric considerations.
Once decisions have been made at each node the strokes are assembled
as sets of arcs that connect. The strokes that result will be the same regardless of the order in which the nodes are processed. The process is robust, in

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that there are no degenerate cases that cause the algorithm to fail, but to
achieve meaningful results it is essential that the data have correct connectivity and, in the case of hydrologic networks, correct flow direction. (According to the context for generalization, one-way restrictions on traffic
flow could be ignored or taken into account by additional rules on arc linking at junctions.)
The resulting strokes are concatenations of arcs each representing a path
through the network from one terminal node to another. There are no restrictions imposed on the overall shape of the stroke that emerges. No consideration is taken of the total curvature of the stroke [c.f. Chaudhry and
Mackaness (2005) implementation], and the resulting stroke could in certain cases self-intersect or form a complete loop thus allowing some orbital routes or ring roads, say, to be represented by single strokes.
3.2 Stroke Ordering
Once the strokes are constructed for a network they must be ordered appropriately, effectively assigning a ranking value or weight to each. The
generalization can then proceed through the removal of some suitable proportion of strokes, in what can be viewed as a thresholding process. The
data can be represented to the cartographer in an interactive display with
slider control of the threshold percentage. Percentage reductions based on
criteria such as Tpfers radical law (Tpfer and Pillewizer 1966) could be
applied, but the interactive method was preferred.
The success of the generalization will depend both on the suitability of
the strokes found and the method used for their ordering. It is to be expected that the ordering method will depend on factors such as the criteria
used in stroke building, the availability of arc attribute data, and the purpose of the generalization.
Stroke attributes on which to base the ordering will be derived from the
attributes of their constituent arcs and nodes. Two important stroke attributes are ratio measures that do not depend on thematic attributes of constituent arcs: stroke length, which is readily found, and a measure of connectivity that can be derived easily from the degrees of the nodes within
the stroke. Other stroke attributes depend on the available arc attribute
data. Road class/category is an important road attribute with values that are
normally nominal, e.g. motorway or single track. However workable
ordinal values usually follow from consideration of the relative road qualities. It may even be possible to derive workable ratio values to represent
road class attributes. The problem is similar to that of deriving 'friction
values' for roads, i.e. dimensionless multiplicative factors, which estimate

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the effective length of a road segment given its attributes (Richardson and
Thomson 1996).
It may be noted that this method of ordering strokes does not use the
implications about relative stroke importance that may be drawn from observing how one stroke terminates at a junction when another passes
through it.
Network Connectivity. In the implementation at the Atlas of Canada
strokes are ordered for generalization in two stages. In the first stage a
stroke salience order is produced through sorting first by road category/class data (if available), and then by stroke length. There is no consideration of strokes role in connectivity and hence no guarantee that the
network would not become disconnected if generalization were applied directly to these strokes. Nevertheless, these strokes have been found to be
useful for several applications (Section 3.3) and good generalization results can often be produced without further consideration of connectivity.
A second stage revision of stroke order eliminates the possible problem
of roads becoming disconnected during stroke removal that has sometimes
been reported (Zhang 2004b; Elias 2002). The reordering procedure used
at the Atlas of Canada has been published (Thomson and Brooks 2000),
albeit with a typing error. The algorithm ensures that if a stroke is removed
then all pairs of its stroke neighbors remain connected by paths through the
strokes that remain. The search for alternative paths is not exhaustive, but
this did not adversely affect the results.
This reordering of strokes is effectively subordinating the perceptual salience of strokes to their structural role in maintaining network connectivity. Thus generalization on the basis of the revised order can lead to
relatively salient strokes being removed while less salient strokes survive
because of their greater structural importance.
3.3 Using Strokes
Use in Generalization. The most successful application of stroke-based
generalization has been to hydrographic networks. The system developed
at the Atlas of Canada was used to generalize the hydrology for a published 1:4M scale map of the three northern territories from source material in the GeoBase Level 0 hydrology dataset. The source data had been
cleaned, attributes had been added, connectivity corrected and directionality computed (Brooks 2000, 2003). The results were comparable in quality
with previous methods, and the new approach brought additional advantages in production (see below).

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Misund et al. (2003), working in hierarchical GML modeling, proposed

stroke extent (a measure roughly equivalent to length but faster to compute) as the best semantic generalization criterion to use for on-the-fly
generalization of transportation networks. Elias (2002) found stroke-based
generalization to be a simple and fast method of producing acceptable way
finding maps, capturing most characteristic structures and major streets.
In a current Ordnance Survey project on the model generalization of
road networks the stroke concept is adapted by adding traffic direction
constraints to support the creation of single line representations for dual
carriageways (Thom 2005). Strokes are detected for the individual carriageways, then paired and collapsed to produce the strokes representing
the dual carriageway, in a network with the same connectivities as the
original.
The stroke-based technique has also been adapted for generalizing fault
lines in geological maps (Downs and Mackaness 2002), and Brooks (personal communication) found good results when applying the method to
pipeline maps.
Tests on road network data at the Atlas of Canada and elsewhere
(Chaudhry and Mackaness 2005; Elias 2002) have produced good results,
and showed the feasibility and potential of the strokes-based approach.
However, limitations of the method for urban road networks have been
recognized by its authors and others (Section 3.4). For example, as the
method stands, its application to road networks often entails additional
special handling for certain junction types, including roundabouts. This
could take the form of pre-processing to recognize and simplify road junctions. Mackaness and McKechnie (1999) have developed techniques that
address this problem. With such techniques in hand, strokes could be extracted from network data over a range of scales. The extraction of strokes
over multiple scales invites further investigation.
Other Uses. The Atlas of Canada drainage basins / hydrology dataset provided a good example of how the stroke model can also be used for other
non-generalization applications. For example, strokes were used in matching name attributes to river tributaries, greatly increasing the efficiency of
that process, and also in defining upstream drainage basins (Brooks 2003).
Elias (personal communication) found stroke salience a useful parameter to guide the automatic selection of the street labels when zooming
street map data. Similarly, stroke length gave a quick means of classifying
urban roads as major and feeder roads and, in an analogous situation, could
even be used to categorize gas supply-line maps into main lines and house

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connections. Heinzle et al. (2005) used strokes in detecting certain important patterns in road networks.
The use of strokes and its related concepts in space syntactic network
analysis is considered below (Section 4.2).
3.4 Further Development of Stroke-Based Generalization
Although stroke-based generalization preferentially retains the more salient strokes in a network and this helps to preserve the network character,
this may not be sufficient when higher level structures are perceptible in
the network i.e. patterns formed from groupings of arcs or strokes. The
network may lose aspects of its character during generalization if certain
patterns are disrupted or lost by stroke removal. The problem is most likely
to occur in dealing with urban road networks, where such patterns are
commonly found, and unlikely to arise with river networks.
As noted (Section 2), characteristic higher-level network patterns were
identified by Zhang (2004a) and Heinzle et al. (2005). All were instances
of one or more perceptual grouping principles. Ideally, network generalization should preserve these patterns where possible, perhaps necessarily in
attenuated form, in order to preserve the network character. Stroke based
generalization as described above does not attempt to retain any higherlevel patterns.
The use of strokes can be viewed as the first, important step in preserving perceptual groupings in network generalization. Strokes can comprise
several network arcs and in that sense are intermediate-level structures, but
they are relatively simple perceptual groups and often serve as a basis for
higher-level groupings. Preserving the more salient strokes helps preserve
one facet of the network character during generalization. The surviving
strokes may then preserve some higher-level perceptual groupings that are
based on them, but this cannot be guaranteed without more relatively sophisticated processing. The work of Edwardes and Mackaness (2000) was
an important advance in this direction.
Using a Networks Areal Dual. Edwardes and Mackaness recognized that
the stroke-based approach to generalization is concerned only with the set
of linear road or street objects and so may not provide sufficient consideration of the networks areal properties. Their solution to this problem (Edwardes and Mackaness 2000) goes a significant way in addressing the
shortcomings of the stroke-based approach described above.
Strokes are used as one tool for characterizing the network in order to
provide global information to the generalization process, but their method

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adopts the areal dual of the network as a second structure for characterization, using the two structures simultaneously to perform the generalization.
The urban spaces are partitioned into city blocks using minimum cycles of
streets, and generalization proceeds by sequential fusion of adjacent blocks
when a block area is below a scale dependent threshold. A partition always
aggregates with its neighbor across the weakest boundary, hence the weakest strokes are removed from the network and the effect on the overall
good continuation of the network is minimized. The area size threshold
can be varied using a function relating it to district density, which helps
preserve network density patterns. Network connectivity is handled implicitly, since block aggregation cannot disconnect the network, although some
special cases need additional processing. The algorithm produces good results, identifying and retaining the essential areal, linear, semantic and
density patterns of the network and its constituent roads.

4 Strokes and Space Syntax

Space syntax is a method for measuring the relative accessibility of different locations in spatial system, including street networks (Hillier and Hanson 1984). Usually analysis proceeds via a derived 'axial map' being a
minimal set of straight-line segments called 'axial lines' which passes
through each convex space and makes all axial links. From the axial map a
map dual graph is extracted whose vertices represent the axial lines and
whose edges link vertices whose corresponding axial lines intersect. This
graph is then analyzed to derive a range of quantitative attributes for each
axial line, which aim to describe aspects of their functionality in the network. Space syntax has proven to be a valuable tool for modeling and analyzing urban patterns with respect to human activity (e.g. pedestrian
movement, traffic flow, burglary).
4.1 Space Syntax in Generalization
Mackaness (1995) first suggested that space syntactic measures could be
used to guide generalization of urban road maps, but the lack of a workable transformation between road network and axial map prevented implementation. Since strokes bring no such problems it was suggested
(Thomson and Richardson 1999) that such measures could be derived from
a basis of strokes rather than axial lines, and used to support generalization.

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The question of whether space syntactic measures can be used directly

in an effective stroke-based generalization of urban networks has been answered, positively, for one particular interpretation of strokes. Jiang and
Claramunt (2004) experimented in the generalization of a street network in
which named streets were used as the spatial descriptors. The authors dismiss strokes as simply graphical elements and fundamentally different in
character from named streets, which they see as functional units of a network. However, their justification for the use of named streets as structuring units, namely the observed fact that named streets often denote a logical flow unit or commercial environment that is often perceived as a whole
by people acting in the city, could quite well be applied to strokes. Also,
as noted above, the Atlas of Canada implementation of stroke extraction
uses available road/street name information to guide the concatenation of
road segments, resulting in continuous, named streets being defined as
strokes.
Thus the Jiang and Claramunt experiments in fact provide a useful example of how space syntactic measures can be derived for strokes in a road
network, and used as parameters to guide generalization. They investigated
three space syntactic measures of centrality: connectivity, betweenness and
integration. Connectivity measures the number of streets incident on a
given street. Betweenness evaluates the extent to which a given street is
part of the shortest paths that connect any two other streets. Integration reflects how far a given street is from every other. Their conclusion was that
these measures, possibly in combination with other geometric and semantic properties, could support useful generalization.
4.2 Strokes in Space Syntax
Spatial data generalization and space syntax share similar goals in the
analysis of spatial structure and functionality. This prompted the question
of whether experience in network generalization could contribute to space
syntax. In particular, could space syntactic analysis using strokes in place
of axial lines bring benefits?
Axial lines represent straight lines of sight possible to follow on foot
(Klarqvist 1993). Their relevance for pedestrian movement is thus clear.
However, their relevance for vehicular traffic flow is less clear: the extent
and continuity of roads could be expected to be important factors influencing the route taken by a motorist. Strokes, by definition and construction,
aim to represent the lines of best continuation, and consequently could be
expected to be appropriate elements for modeling and analysis in such contexts. Supportive evidence for this view may be drawn from studies such

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as those of Conroy Dalton (2001), which suggest that travelers appear to

try to conserve linearity throughout their journey, avoiding unforced deflections.
Thus, the suggestion was made (Thomson 2003) that there is good reason to believe that for analyses of road networks on the urban scale or
wider, and for traffic movement studies in particular, strokes could be
more suitable spatial descriptors than axial lines. (Concerns about the limitations of axial lines as spatial descriptors for road networks had already
led to the development of approaches that take into account the angular deflection between intersecting axial lines (e.g. Turner 2001; Dalton 2001),
with the later extension of these methods to road centerline data (Dalton et
al. 2003; Turner 2005) but these techniques did not use strokes.) The use
of strokes or stroke-like elements in space syntactic analysis has since been
implemented, with positive results. Two examples follow; both reinforce
claims that strokes are important functional units of networks.
Continuity Lines. Figueiredo (2004) was directly influenced by the
above suggestion, and applied the stroke building idea to concatenate axial
lines into direct analogues of strokes, termed continuity lines (to better
emphasize the idea of movement through a network with minimal deflection at junctions). It was found for a range of cities that all correlations between vehicular flows and syntactic variables (length, connectivity, integration) improve when using continuity lines in place of axial lines (Figueiredo and Amorim 2004). It was concluded that they revealed the importance of curved or sinuous paths, which is not clearly brought out by
axial lines. Continuity maps were also felt to be more appropriate to the
handling of long or extended paths and hence a better foundation for studies of traffic patterns (Figueiredo and Amorim 2005). Figueiredos software could in principle derive continuity lines from both axial lines and
road centerline data; no tests with the latter have been reported, but would
be expected to produce similar results.
Intersection Continuity Negotiation. Porta et al. (2004) made a comparative study of some structural properties of networks, and sought to develop methods that improve the correlation between measures of the structure of the network and measures of the dynamics on the network.
The method they developed used a technique to recognize the continuity of street segments through intersections and this information was
used in constructing the dual graph. To detect continuities, the 'named
streets' approach (Jiang and Claramunt 2004) was rejected as restrictive
and costly (due to problems in establishing the required data). Instead, a
generalization approach termed intersection continuity negotiation

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(ICN) was adopted. ICN is identical with stroke construction in all important respects. The vertices of the resulting dual graph thus represent
strokes, the arcs indicate stroke intersections, and syntactic analyses are as
for conventional graphs derived from axial maps.
Useful features of the ICN (stroke-building) model were that it allows
complex chains like loops and tailed loops to be recognized, and captures
most of the continuity of paths throughout urban networks. Also, being
based on a pure spatial principle of continuity, it avoids problems of social
interpretation. From the combined analyses of the dual graph and a primal
graph (derived directly from the original network map) new and useful
measures of network structure are being developed (Porta et al. 2005).

5 Conclusions
Strokes are simple elements of a network, readily perceived in its map,
whose visual salience broadly reflects functional importance within the
network. The perceived paths of good continuation in the map indicate
natural lines of flow in the physical network. Because of the good general
correlation between these two aspects of strokes they form a suitable basis
for network generalization, through the preferential preservation of the
more salient strokes in data reduction.
This paper approached the functional-graphical nature of strokes via a
wider consideration of perceptual grouping. Perceptual groups in a representation of the world such as an image or map generally reflect important
features in the world being represented. Retaining the more salient perceptual groups in a network during generalization should therefore help to preserve both its functionally important features and the visual character of
the map.
Hence the use of strokes can be viewed as a first, important step in preserving perceptual groupings in generalization. Strokes are relatively simple groups and often serve as a basis for higher-level groupings. Preserving
the more salient strokes helps preserve one facet of the network character
during generalization; the surviving strokes may preserve some higherlevel perceptual groupings that are based on them, but this cannot be guaranteed without more relatively sophisticated processing. For networks
without such patterns, such as river networks, strokes provide a basis for
effective and efficient generalization as demonstrated in the production
of commercial maps.
Methods for implementing network generalization on the basis of
strokes were described. Recent applications of strokes in generalization

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and other analyses were reviewed. The limitations of stroke-based generalization were also discussed, and further development of the technique
was considered.
Finally, some links between network generalization, space syntax analysis, and strokes were highlighted. Here strong support for the view that
strokes represent important structural/functional units of networks was
found in examples of space syntactic network analysis incorporating the
use of strokes or closely similar elements.

Acknowledgments
The discussions with Rupert Brooks and William Mackaness concerning
the topics of this paper are greatly appreciated.

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