A demonstration of HadoopViz: an extensible MapReduce system for visualizing big spatial data

This demonstration presents HadoopViz; an extensible MapReduce-based system for visualizing Big Spatial Data. HadoopViz has two main unique features that distinguish it from other techniques. (1) It provides an extensible interface that allows users to visualize various types of data by defining five abstract functions, without delving into the details of the MapReduce algorithms. We show how it is used to create four types of visualizations, namely, scatter plot, road network, frequency heat map, and temperature heat map. (2) HadoopViz is capable of generating big images with giga-pixel resolution by employing a three-phase approach of partitioning, rasterize, and merging. HadoopViz generates single and multi-level images, where the latter allows users to zoom in/out to get more/less details. Both types of images are generated with a very high resolution using the extensible and scalable framework of HadoopViz.