Geo-Gap Tree: A Progressive Query and Visualization Method for Massive Spatial Data

Online visualization and query of massive geo-spatial data are facing increasing challenges with the explosive growth of location-based spatial datasets. In the practical scenario, online visualization is carried out in a progressive way, namely, a sketchy view map is first presented, and more detailed view maps are produced gradually as the viewport scale goes deeper. One approach is to use the multi-scale spatial index technique. However, it loses the original data attribute and cannot provide spatial statistics information. The paper is to provide an improved index structure, the Geo-Gap tree, which aims to enhance online interactive access to large spatial datasets, as well as enable one to compute statistical attributes like aggregation at the coarse level. Therefore, the first focus of Geo-Gap tree is improving the efficiency of tree building. For this purpose, an adaptive geohash coding is introduced to reduce the computing of neighboring objects. And, this phase can be improved in parallel once objects are partitioned. Compare to Gap tree, the cost of building the Geo-Gap tree can be greatly reduced. The second contribution is to choose data at different level based on sampling so that a sample for each level can be served as a progressive query result. The third contribution is an estimation of progressive query results, which ensure that progressive query accuracy can be controlled within the range of theoretical analysis. With the query continuing to execute, the query results become more and more accurate. The method is now integrated successfully into a high-performance geographic information system called HiGIS.