ABSTRACT

Geospatial data is different from other kinds of data in that spatial data

describes objects or phenomena with a specific location in the real world.

Geospatial data arises in many applications, including credit card payments,

telephone calls, environmental records, and census demographics. In this

chapter, we provide an overview of the special characteristics and methods

that are needed for the visualization of geospatial data, sometimes called

geovisualization. We introduce the most important basics of geospatial vi-

sualization, such as map projections, and discuss visualization techniques

for point, line, area, and surface data. Due to the large scope of visual-

ization techniques in geographic information systems (GIS) and cartogra-

phy, we only provide a basic introduction from a visualization perspective.

More details about GIS, spatial visualization, and cartography can be found

in [66, 257, 281, 327, 384]. After reading the chapter, the reader should have

a general understanding about state-of-the-art visualization techniques for

geospatial data and should be able to implement and use them.