Abstract

This paper analyses and shows the need of a client side web API devoted to present and explore spatial information through thematic maps. We define a set of requirements for such API, most notably the ability to process datasets with many millions of points, allowing full interactivity, providing a high level of abstraction and defining clear paths for easy extension at many levels. The Gisplay API is implemented using WebGL, enabling the required speed for full interactive thematic maps with millions of points. Such claims are experimentally demonstrated. Gisplay already provides 4 types of thematic maps and very detailed discussion is presented showing the high level of abstraction and the different mechanisms to extend it. This extensibility is based on a modular architecture which includes an intermediate API that deals with WebGL complexity.

Links

• doi:10.1007/978-3-319-62407-5_49

BibTeX (Download)

@inproceedings{cardoso2017,
title = {Gisplay-Extensible Web API for Thematic Maps with WebGL},
author = { Diogo Cardoso and Rui Alves and João Moura Pires and Fernando Birra and Ricardo Silva},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-62407-5_49},
year  = {2017},
date = {2017-07-15},
booktitle = {International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications},
pages = {674--689},
organization = {Springer},
abstract = {This paper analyses and shows the need of a client side web API devoted to present and explore spatial information through thematic maps. We define a set of requirements for such API, most notably the ability to process datasets with many millions of points, allowing full interactivity, providing a high level of abstraction and defining clear paths for easy extension at many levels. The Gisplay API is implemented using WebGL, enabling the required speed for full interactive thematic maps with millions of points. Such claims are experimentally demonstrated. Gisplay already provides 4 types of thematic maps and very detailed discussion is presented showing the high level of abstraction and the different mechanisms to extend it. This extensibility is based on a modular architecture which includes an intermediate API that deals with WebGL complexity.},
keywords = {Spatial data visualisation, Thematic maps, WebGL},
pubstate = {published},
tppubtype = {inproceedings}
}