VAT: A System for Visualizing, Analyzing and Transforming Spatial Data in Science

Abstract

The amount of available data changes the style of research in geo-scientific domains, and thus influences the requirements for spatial processing systems. To support data-driven research and exploratory workflows, we propose the Visualization, Analysis & Transformation system (VAT). We first identify ten fundamental requirements, which span from supporting spatial data types over low latency computations to visualization techniques. Based on these we evaluate state-of-the-art systems from the domains of spatial frameworks, GIS, workflow systems, scientific databases and Big Data solutions. The goal of the VAT system is to overcome the identified limitations by a holistic approach to raster and vector data, demand-driven and tiled processing, and the efficient usage of heterogeneous hardware architectures. A first comparison with other systems shows the validity of our approach.