Hi,
[quote user="quasi_modo"]Thanks a lot for your ideas so far![/quote]
Some more ideas, but they belong to an ideal world and cannot be applied easily to MicroStation:
- Export shape level to PostGIS database. If you are not familiar with PostGIS, it's GIS extension running on top of PostgreSQL database. PostGIS is very powerfull and it offers some generalization and simplification "SQL functions", so you can simplify geometry directly in database. Unfortunately there is no support for Postgre in MicroStation and even not in Bentley Map (which is incredible as PostGIS is widely used and top GIS product). But at least, I can imagine there is some way how to e.g. export the level content to DGN V7, use ogr2ogr tool to load/convert DGN V7 to Postgre DB ... but some knowledge of PostgreSQL, PostGIS and ogr is required :-)
- Export shape level to QGIS. This software also includes some generalization algorithms, but I have no experience how good they are.
- Even more theoretical and technology idea, just to sketch how these tasks are sometimes solved in GIS systems: There is a standard called OGC Web Processing Service (not used too much) that defines communication betwen a client and server providing "geospatial services". There are some servers, typically open source comming from university projects focusing on generalization services (e.g. WebGEN or North52° WPS) that are able to generalize / simplify provided data or make any other geo processing (see e.g. this short video). Using WPS in a practice is not too often as far as I know, the first version of the standard was too general and the implementation is not straightforward, so it's more known in academic environment, but it's an example of another approach: Using generally accepted standards (GML, WFS...) to establish servers that are able to geoprocess input data and it's not important if a client is e.g. web page that need to display some extra layer with specific data or heavy desktop client asking for functionality not available in the product itself.
With regards,
Jan