How to intelligently degrade or smooth GIS data (simplifying polygons)?

Question

I have detailed US county maps, from the TIGER LINE data sets. How might I sample, smooth, or degrade the data so that I get straighter, more boxy, less \"noisy\" shapes to

Answer 1

You could also use Simplify.js which uses a combination of Douglas-Peucker and Radial Distance algorithms. There are also links to many ports to other languages listed on the github project