IIIT Hyderabad Publications |
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LSIVIEWER 2.0 - A Client Oriented Online Visualization Tool for Geospatial Vector DataAuthor: Manikanta Kondeti Date: 2017-07-31 Report no: IIIT/TH/2017/49 Advisor:K S Rajan AbstractGeographical Information Systems(GIS) is a powerful, ubiquitous tool that can be seen in various domains of today's fast-moving and highly technological landscape. With the rising needs and uses of GIS data visualization system, such as smart city planning, environment and climate change monitoring, weather simulation, transportation and so forth, the Geospatial vec- tor visualization research, application and technology has become prevalent. Large amounts of data can be visualized on an interactive platform which is one of the most appealing and useful abilities of GIS. High powered computers can visualize large data sets, change element of the display easily, give any visual effects for better view and also make suitable interpretations. Recent Geospatial data visualization systems have been predominantly through applications that are installed and run in a desktop environment. The drawbacks with the desktop application model is that it is tightly coupled to the desktop environment attributes like operating system and hardware of the system. Desktop applica- tion has the limitations to be used on multiple devices like smartphones, tablets and personal computers simultaneously. Also, it lacks the scope to collaborate with the other users. To solve the above problems a client-server model has been adopted where data on a single sys- tem can be accessed, manipulated and visualised on different clients without any environment dependencies. Over the last decade, this server-client model for data handling, data rendering and visualization has been the most prevalent approach in WebGIS. But the above paradigm of WebGIS gives limited capabilities and functionalities to the client to handle the Geospatial data making it dumb. Although the client-side technologies have become functionally more powerful over the recent years, the above model has largely ignored it and is still in a mode of server-dominant computing paradigm. Given the current scenario of the GIS visualization systems, an attempt has been made to develop and demonstrate LSIViewer - a simple, easy and robust online Geospatial data visuali- sation system for the user's own data that harness the client's capabilities for data rendering and user-interactive styling, with a reduced load on the server. The technologies chosen to build this system makes the application extensible and scalable. The architecture of LSIViewer is based on client-server model where role of the server is to provide the instance of the client ap- plication, act as an adapter and convert the input vector data into a GeoJSON format, compress the GeoJSON encoded data and send it as a response to the client. GDAL/OGR, a popular open source format translator GIS library, is used in conversion of vector format to GeoJSON. The transmission of GeoJSON data between client and server is optimized by reducing the information size using efficient compression method that is supported in all the web-browsers. The client decompresses the encoded response and render the map on HTML5 canvas via JavaScript. The performance analysis on the developed system included various tests that were run on a range of vector datasets. These tests showed that the time taken to render the vector data using LSIViewer is comparable to a desktop GIS application, QGIS, over an identical system con- figuration. All the web browsers that support HTML5 give the capability of rendering vector data to the client, making the developed application a platform-independent and installation- free toolkit. This indicates that any device with a web browser has the capability to visualize vector data without the need of a full-scale GIS desktop application. Eventually, the developed system can be extended to build an enterprise level collaborative GIS platform for users and developers to share and analyze their data. This online visualization tool is just an inception, opening the gates to a whole new horizon of things that can be possible through WebGIS. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Spatial Informatics |
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