[remus]

What's novel/interesting about this? Speaking as an ignorant outsider, it seems like they're 'just' querying existing data and plotting it. Obviously this is a gross simplification, but I'd be really interested to hear what's hard about this problem.

[mattlutze]

From the introduction,

  Since the days of Harry Beck, transit maps have mostly been created manually by professional map designers (Garland Citation1994; Wu et al. Citation2020). The primary focus was on static maps, either distributed in print or electronically. These maps are typically schematic, and the classic octilinear design (network segment orientations are multiples of 45∘) is still prevalent. In the late 1990s, the graph drawing community started to investigate the problem of drawing such maps automatically. The following questions were investigated: (1) How can graphs be drawn in an octilinear fashion? (2) Which hard criteria should a transit map fulfil? (3) Which soft criteria should be optimized? Several methods have since been proposed (see below). A set of soft and hard criteria, first described by Nöllenburg (Citation2005), has since been generally accepted. The important sub-problem of finding an optimal line ordering of lines travelling through network segments has also been identified very early by Benkert et al. (Citation2006).

It not trivial to automatically generate an optimally understandable octalinear transit map, and this group have combined bits of 30 years of research to do it in one go for every* bit of public transit on the planet.

* every bit that's in OSM, I suppose

[remus]

Thanks, seems like the devil is in the details. It's a cool piece of work, very impressive browsing the generated maps.

[mistrial9]

ok yes BUT .. a reason that transit maps were carefully composed is because people "who probably need assistance when using transit" plus "people who do not speak this human language" plus "people who depend on completeness and accuracy to a high degree" are all, at the same time, using one and only one map.

hurrah for computer science BUT this is also graphic design, with human factors, and simultaneously authoritative data that does matter to many real people. Easy tag-on criticism is "who needs all transit maps worldwide at all times" ? Isn't it obviously more important to have reliable, accurate, readable maps for the people who are using the system heavily in that area, instead of stretching all of those qualities to get a toy-prize for armchair readers and the world cloud servers on the Internet? common sense plays a role in the guaging accolades here IMHO

[mattlutze]

I think you're describing one of the core motivations for these decades of research.

In most places still, changes to these maps need to go through lots of people process. This implies they're slow to update, and therefore often not entirely accurate or optimally understandable. For example, consider service works or temporary outtages.

The outcome of this research is not a toy-prize for armchair readers, but a generalized algorithmic approach to building necessary and important accessibility tools.

[mistrial9]

as research it is interesting and gets wide attention, yes.

the reasoning above is a basis for rational discussion?

difficult to say in a diplomatic way on a computer science forum, that "replacing" human graphic design using algorithms does not get unlimited upvotes from me for real reasons