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 visualization, such as map projections, and discuss visualization techniques for point, line, area, and surface data. Due to the large scope of visualization techniques in geographic information systems (GIS) and cartography, we only provide a basic introduction from a visualization perspective. More details about GIS, spatial visualization, and cartography can be found in [54, 223, 243, 283, 327]. 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.
