Visualization and User Interface

Abstract

Spatial data, by its very nature, lends itself to graphical display; we do not think of a country, a place, or a route as a set of numeric coordinates, but as a physical object in the world with a location and shape. Text-based formats such as well-known text (WKT) are all very well as a method of exchanging spatial data, but they’re simply not viable options for presenting or analyzing that information (and well-known binary is even worse!). Instead, we generally want to portray spatial data in a way that lets us visually examine the shape and location of each element, as well as consider the proximity and relationships between different elements in space. In other words, we expect spatial data to be graphically represented on a map of some sort.