Abstract: A progressive representation model for street networks of vector data was presented based on the theory of plane Euclidean graph and abstract complex cell.Abstraction operator and refinement operator were used define the street elimination operator and street refinement operator.Topological consistency is implicit in the progressive representation model built on such operators.This model shows that the accumulation of changes and the execution of atomic operators that produce these changes both have sequences.A progressive generalization algorithm based on the ordered generalization tree structure was proposed.This algorithm brought both the map generalization knowledge and data structure.Hence,the generalization process can be implemented intelligently in such a way.