Real-Time Clustering of Large Geo-Referenced Data for Visualizing on Map

Abstract

Displaying geo-referenced data in web mapping systems has become popular. However, most existing systems suffer from three annoying problems: (1) clutter when trying to visualize large amount of data; (2) slowness of transferring data over internet; (3) lack of support for dynamic queries. To solve these problems, we propose a real-time system using server-side clustering, transferring only the clustered data, and client-side visualization using existing map tools. As far as we know, there is no other scientific paper describing such real-time system that allows dynamic database queries without limiting to predefined queries. Experiments show that it can handle up to 1 million objects whereas all existing systems are either limited to pre-defined queries, or they support only a very small number of free parameters in the query whereas the proposed system has no such limitations.

Keywords

• data visualization
• clustering methods
• web services
• client-server systems
• Internet