Vector-Based Realisation of Geographical Voronoi Treemaps With the ArcGIS Engine

Abstract

In geographical field, the researches on spatial hierarchies are extensive, but there is a lack of effective method to generate and express hierarchical spatial structures. As a frequently-used visualising method, Voronoi Treemaps are able to represent hierarchical data, but limited to displaying non-spatial data. The approach of geographical Voronoi Treemaps is proposed to solve these problems by allowing for spatial division from point features with spatial coordinates and references. Additionally, this enables to create hierarchical layouts in the form of Voronoi Treemap in GIS environments with the ArcGIS Engine. The generated layouts are saved in a geodatabase, which is convenient for adding GIS enhancements such as colouring, edge sizes, legends, borders, scales, and compass. The approach aims to establish a kind of spatial data model to represent urban hierarchies, organisation structures and region differences and so on, which expands the application range of Voronoi Treemaps in the geographical field.