This article tackles the longstanding issue of intermodality head on. From a geomatics perspective, we model both maritime and road networks connecting port and non-port cities taking into account crucial features such as physical geography, shortest paths, and transport costs. This creates the opportunity to study a hybrid network -both planar and non-planar, and the centrality/accessibility of cities in this bilayered network. Based on the case of Australia, main results convey new empirical findings on how port and urban hierarchies correlate with single-layered and bi-layered connectivity. We discuss main results in the light of network science, spatial science, and transport studies.

Automatic map generalization requires the use of computationally intensive processes often unable to deal with large datasets. Distributing the generalization process is the only way to make them scalable and usable in practice. But map generalization is a highly contextual process, and the surroundings of a generalized map feature needs to be known to generalize the feature, which is a problem as distribution might partition the dataset and parallelize the processing of each part. This paper proposes experiments to evaluate the past propositions to distribute map generalization, and to identify the main remaining issues. The past propositions to distribute map generalization are first discussed, and then the experiment hypotheses and apparatus are described. The experiments confirmed that regular partitioning was the quickest strategy, but also the less effective in taking context into account. The geographical partitioning, though less effective for now, is quite promising regarding the quality of the results as it better integrates the geographical context.

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

European cities, like most of the world's cities, are to some degree dependent upon maritime transport for their development, as more than 90% of seaborne trade volume is carried by sea. This also applies to Europe's external trade. While cities possessing ports play a crucial role in the distribution of goods traffic in such a context, the maritime influence exerted by global trade on non-port, inland cities have not been so far studied from a combined sea-land perspective. The results show a differentiation of the European territory in terms of modal specialization, core-periphery, polycentricity, and intermodal centrality / accessibility. We map the maritime specialization of European cities in recent decades, showing that combined sea-land centrality has stable but different relationships according to the type of place considered. The conclusion discusses the outcomes of our results for policy and further research on coupled networks and urban studies.