This paper describes an approach for the typification of buildings using a meshsimplification technique. The approach is adapted from the area of computer graphics and was originally developed for surface reconstruction and mesh simplification. The main goal was to develop an algorithm which creates fast and reproducible results. The typification procedure is modelled as a two-stage process, with the steps 'positioning' and 'representation'. While the positioning step determines the number and the position of the building objects based on Delaunay triangulation, the representation step is used to calculate the size and orientation for the replacement buildings. The results presented show the important influence of weights during positioning steps to control the object distribution. The proposed parameters are the number of objects as well as several object characteristics such as size, shape, orientation, and semantic. The approach has to be extended, if building alignments are also to be preserved. Further applications are imaginable, for instance the icon placement on dynamic maps.

Beyond any doubt much of the current web mapping and web GIS applications lack cartographic quality. Thereasons aren't only the technical limitations related to Internet delivery, but also the neglect of one of the maincartographic principles of digital mapping, namely adaptive zooming. Adaptive zooming describes the adjustmentof a map, its contents and the symbolization to target scale in consequence of a zooming operation. The approachdescribed in this paper proposes the combination of two commonly known concepts: on the one hand levelsof detail (LoD) for those object classes, that require high computational cost for the automated generalizationprocess (e.g. buildings, road network); on the other hand an on‐the‐fly generalization for those object classeswhich can be generalized by less complex methods and algorithms (e.g. rivers, lakes). Realizing such interactiveand dynamic concept for web mapping requires the use of vector based visualization tools. The data format bestmeeting the criteria is the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Thus, it has been used to implementthe presented ideas in a prototype application for topographic web mapping based on the landscape modelVECTOR25 of the Swiss Federal Office of Topography.