Page 297 - Contributed Paper Session (CPS) - Volume 4
P. 297

CPS2230 Braden P. et al.
            solution  addressing  the fact  that  simply  enlarging  the  region  would  cause
            other issues that may not be as easy to fix.

            4.4 Enlarging Regions
                In some countries, we may have some regions that are hard to see when
            plotted in LMplots, but that are surrounded by large regions. In these types of
            cases, it is possible to address the small regions without having to change too
            much of the underlying shape of the shapefile. In these cases, we can enlarge
            the areas of the smaller regions into the larger surrounding regions.
                When enlarging a region in Mapshaper, the scaling of a region is centered
            at the midpoint of the original region. This process does not save the existing
            borders between two neighboring regions and instead, the enlarged region
            and all of its neighbors now have overlapping borders. In order to correct this,
            we first shift the enlarged region to the location we desire and then cut out a
            hole  in  the  existing  region,  effectively  removing  parts  of  the  surrounding
            polygons and, by extension, the overlap caused by the enlarging of a region.
            We  can  then  put  our  modified  enlarged  region  in  the  hole  that  we  had
            previously cut out.
                Figure 4 shows a potential modification performed on the country of Libya,
            whose northwestern states are comparatively small when compared to the
            other states in the country.





















            4.5 Moving Disjoint Areas of the Same Administrative District
                In some cases, it may not be enough to employ any single method from
            the previous sections for a given subregion within the area of interest. These
            cases are rare, but employ multiple methods from the previous sections. Take
            the South American country of Columbia, for example, shown in Figure 5. No
            single transformation could have provided a representation that allows a user
            to see all regions within the country in a meaningful way. In fact, multiple steps
            have to be performed on a single region to place it in a meaningful location.



                                                               286 | I S I   W S C   2 0 1 9
   292   293   294   295   296   297   298   299   300   301   302