Interactive and Online Buffer-Overlay Analytics of Large-Scale Spatial Data

Abstract

Buffer and overlay analysis are fundamental operations which are widely used in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for resource allocation, land planning, and other relevant fields. Real-time buffer and overlay analysis for large-scale spatial data remains a challenging problem because the computational scales of conventional data-oriented methods expand rapidly with data volumes. In this paper, we present HiBO, a visualization-oriented buffer-overlay analysis model which is less sensitive to data volumes. In HiBO, the core task is to determine the value of pixels for display. Therefore, we introduce an efficient spatial-index-based buffer generation method and an effective set-transformation-based overlay optimization method. Moreover, we propose a fully optimized hybrid-parallel processing architecture to ensure the real-time capability of HiBO. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our approach is capable of handling ten-million-scale spatial data in real time. An online demonstration of HiBO is provided (http://www.higis.org.cn: 8080/hibo).