Generating Random Fractal Terrain - some algorithms about automatically generating terrain.
Efficient Visualization of Large-Scale Data on Hierarchical Meshes - this seems to be the paper to read. Basically seems to be talking about my approach to topographical data representation. A lucky find. Now it'll be hard to convince anybody that I was thinking in this direction before finding the paper, but whatever. I don't care if people believe I was first. Just that I actually write the damned mapper.
The Virtual Terrain Project - papers and resources about rendering terrain.
Terragen - a cool (commercial) whose goal is generating beautiful photorealistic terrain. They succeed.
Demeter Terrain Engine - a LGPL C++ Terrain Rendering Engine for OpenGL. This is exciting and wonderful, and if we could incorporate it somehow eventually, I'd pretty much wet myself.
Automatic generation of ...- contour line calculation paper