A STUDY OF THE IMPACT OF AUTOMATED EDITING ON POLYGON OVERLAY ANALYSIS ACCURACY

Polygon overlay is among the most widely and frequently used Geographi c Information System (GIS) operations. A polygon overlay operation may generate a large number of small polygons even when there exist few d igitizing problems. Tn practical applications, automated editing metho ds are used to eliminate the small polygons for improving efficiency. However, automated editing may introduce errors because the locations originally occupied by the polygons eliminated are associated with cha nged attribute values. Knowledge about the errors is important for avo iding errors of unacceptable levels. In this research, the impacts of automated editing on overlay analysis accuracy are studied. The relati onship between editing parameters and the errors introduced are invest igated. Mathematical models are created to predict the errors. Two aut omated editing methods are examined and compared.