The Era of Big Spatial Data: A Survey

Abstract

The recent explosion in the amount of spatial data calls for specialized systems to handle big spatial data. In this paper, we survey and contrast the existing work that has been done in the area of big spatial data. We categorize the existing work in this area from three different angles, namely, approach, architecture, and components. (1) The approaches used to implement spatial query processing can be categorized as on-top, from-scratch and built-in approaches. (2) The existing works follow different architectures based on the underlying system they extend such as MapReduce, key-value stores, or parallel DBMS. (3) We also categorize the existing work into four main components, namely, language, indexing, query processing, and visualization. We describe each component, in details, and give examples of how it is implemented in existing work. At the end, we give cast studies of real applications that make use of these systems to provide services for end users.