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Visual Interfaces for Geographic Data

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Synonyms

Geovisualization; Interactive capture; Interactive layout; Visual DB access; Visualizing spatial data

Definition

Geographic data are in essence visual multimedia data. Entrying those data with keyboards and printing them as tables of data are not very practical actions. For entry, special devices exist (theodolites, lasers, aerial photos, satellite images, GPS receivers, sensors, etc.), whereas visual layout is currently named cartography or mapping. Visual interfaces have two facets, allowing the user to present their output as maps, possibly with very large printers, or small screens and to present spatial queries visually. A new interesting direction is to use visualization for accessing gradually to databases.

Historical Background

In the 1970s, the used expression was “computer-aided mapping” emphasizing the idea that printing maps was the sole scope of using computers. Then, in the 1980s, the more important was the structuring of geographic databases, and then the...

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Correspondence to Robert Laurini .

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Laurini, R. (2018). Visual Interfaces for Geographic Data. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_813

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