Abstract: With the rapid development of urban construction, the management of vector topographic map data and automatic updating have been attached great importance to the land planning department. On one hand, the region-based updating method is easy to implement and of high efficiency, but it may cause the redundancy of historical database because of repeated updating of non-changing elements. On the other hand, the element-based updating method which is not suitable for large changes in the amount of updates because it merely updates the changed elements and needs complex change detections. In order to solve the problem that the updating method cannot be adaptively selected during the process of updating, a map updating method based on map information variation is proposed. Based on the updating cases of 1:2000 topographic maps of residential areas, we found that the proposed method can effectively improve the data updating efficiency. We can also draw the following three conclusions. ① When the rate of change is less than 20%, the element-based updating method is adopted. ② If the rate of change is more than 55%, the region-based updating method can produce higher update efficiency. ③ The update efficiency is not significant when the rate is between 20% and 55%. The experimental results have important reference value for the design of the updating scheme of topographic maps.

Key words: region updating, element renew, map information volume, topographic map