VORONOI DIAGRAMS WITHOUT BOUNDING BOXES

Abstract. We present a technique for presenting geographic data in Voronoi diagrams without having to specify a bounding box. The method restricts Voronoi cells to points within a user-defined distance of the data points. The mathematical foundation of the approach is presented as well. The cell clipping method is particularly useful for presenting geographic data that is spread in an irregular way over a map, as for example the Dutch dialect data displayed in Figure 2. The automatic generation of reasonable cell boundaries also makes redundant a frequently used solution to this problem that requires data owners to specify region boundaries, as in Goebl (2010) and Nerbonne et al (2011).