38 lines
5.2 KiB
TeX
38 lines
5.2 KiB
TeX
\section{Introduction}
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% Introduction
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% Fragestellung & Zielsetzung - aim & research objectives
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% Forschungsstand -
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% Vorgehensweise
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% Inhalt
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% Why important, who participants, trends,
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Compression of polygonal data structures is the task of simplifying geometries while preseving topological characteristics. The simplification often takes the form of removing points that make up the geometry. There are several solutions that tackle the problem in different ways. This thesis aims to compare and classify these solutions by various heuristics. Performance and compression rate are quantitative heuristic used. Positional, length and area errors will also be measured to quantify simplification errors. Qualitative heuristics will be determined by a user study. With the rising trend of moving desktop applications to the web platform also geographic information systems (GIS) have experienced the shift towards web browsers [example ESRI Web Gis]. Performance is critical in these applications. Since simplification is an important factor to performance the solutions will be tested by constructing a web application using a technology called WebAssembly.
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\subsection{Binary instruction sets on the web platform}
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The recent development of WebAssembly allows code written in various programming languages to be run natively in web browsers. A privilege thus far only granted to the Javascript programming language. The goals of WebAssembly are to define a binary instruction format as a compilation target to execute code at native speed and taking advantage of common hardware capabilities [web-source wasm]. The integration into the web platform brings portability to a wide range of platforms like mobile and internet of things (IoT). The usage of this technology promises performance gains that will be tested by this thesis. The results can give conclusions to whether WebAssembly is worth a consideration for web applications with geographic computational aspects. WebGIS is an example technology that would benefit greatly of such an advancement. Thus far WebAssembly has been shipped to the stable version of the four most used browser engines [source]. The mainly targeted high-level languages for compilation are C and C++ [wasm-specs]. Also a compiler for Rust has been developed [rust-wasm working group]. It will be explored how existing implementations could easily be adopted when using a compiler.
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\subsection{Performance as important factor for web applications}
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Performance is one of the factors users complain the most about in websites. [Some study] shows that insufficient UI-performance is the main reason for negative user experience. [Another study] states that users will immediately leave websites after only 2 seconds of unresponsiveness. There has been a rapid growth of complex applications running in web-browsers [source]. These so called progressive web apps (PWA) combine the fast reachability of web pages with the feature richness of locally installed applications. Even though these applications can grow quire complex, the requirement for fast page loads and short time to user interaction still remains. One way to cope this need is the use of compression algorithms to reduce the amount of data transmitted and processed. Compression can be lossless. This is often used for the purpose of data transmission. Web servers use lossless compression algorithms like gzip to deflate data. Browsers that implement these algorithms can then fully restore the requested ressources resulting in lower bandwidth usage. Another form of compression removes information of the data in a way that cannot be restored. This is called lossy compression. The most common usage on the web is the compression of image data.
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\subsection{Topology simplification for rendering performance}
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While compression is often used to minimize bandwidth usage the compression of geospatial data can particulary influence rendering performance. The bottleneck for rendering often is the svg transformation used to display topology on the web [source]. Implementing simplification algorithms for use on the web platform can lead to smoother user experience when working with large geodata sets.
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\subsection{Structure of this thesis}
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This thesis is structured into a theoretical and a practical component. First the theoretical principles will be reviewed. Topology of polygonal data will be explained as how to store geodata. Also the fundamentals of LineString simplification will be covered.
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Then a number of algorithms will be introduced. In this section the each algorithm will be dissected by complexity, characteristics and the possible influence to the heuristics mentioned above.
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In the fourth chapter the practical implementation will be presented. This section will dig deeper in several topics important to web development. Such as single page applications, WebAssembly and how web workers will be used for asynchronous execution. The developed application will aim to implement modern best practices in web development such fast time to first user interaction and deferred loading of modules.
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The fifth chapter explains how performance will be measured in the web application. After presenting the
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results the concluion chapter will finish the thesis.
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