Abstract. Aggregation is an important operation for the generalization of land-cover data. However, current research often entails aggregation on a global perspective, which is not conducive to capturing the spatial characteristics of geographic objects with significant spatial structures, i.e., structured geographic objects. Hence this paper proposes an area aggregation method that can maintain the boundary characteristics of the structured geographic objects. First, we identify the structured geographic objects based on the description parameters of the spatial structure. Second, a Miter-type buffer transformation is introduced to extract the boundary of each structured geographic object, and area elements inside the boundary are processed with corresponding aggregation operations. Finally, the boundary of the structured geographic objects and the aggregation result of the area elements are inserted back into the aggregated result of the original land-cover data using the NOT operation. The proposed approach is experimentally validated using geographical condition census data for a city in southern China. The experimental result indicates that the proposed approach not only reasonably identify the typical characteristics of structured geographic objects but also effectively maintains the boundary characteristics of these objects.

Abstract. Smart City is a new concept that uses Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to promote the smartification of urban construction, planning and services. Currently, a number of countries and cities have conducted studies on Smart City, but they mostly focused on the conceptual connotations analysis and applications in specific domains, lacking a common, shareable and integrated framework understanding, which led to significant barriers among individual Smart City projects. By analyzing the framework connotations and application domains of Smart City, this paper proposed a common, shareable and integrated conceptual framework for smart city. Then based on this framework, a unified portal platform that is suitable for multiple domains, including the government, citizen and business, as well as common, custom and other application modes, is further proposed. Finally, Smart Weifang was implemented based on this platform. The application outcomes indicate that this common and shareable platform can effectively eliminate the data and technological barriers between different smart city systems, while also avoiding redundant financial investments. The investigation of the proposed framework and platform is of key significance to the unified construction of Smart City and the intensification of the hardware environment, thus representing a true achievement in the transition from “information island” to “information sharing and interconnection” for urban informatization.