Author(s)

Christopher Gold

Abstract

In environmental applications such as forestry, the capture of the polygonal structuring of the data is expensive in terms of hardware, software and labour - due largely to difficulties in constructing a topologically complete map. This paper will show that, for many applications, topological structuring and data entry methods may be made quite simple. The example used is a paper map of forest polygons. The map must usually have the relevant polygons digitized manually, but instead of drawing individual boundaries to be connected later the operator is instructed to draw around the interior of each polygon in turn, generating a set of'fringe' points labelled with the relevant polygon's number. If the map has no other information on it then it may be scanned instead, and saved as an image. Simple image proces

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