A Demonstration of Interactive Exploration of Big Geospatial Data on UCR-Star

Abstract

The ever rising volume of geospatial data is undeniable. So is the need to explore and analyze these datasets. However, these datasets vary widely in their size, coverage, and accuracy. Therefore, users need to assess these aspects of the data to choose the right dataset to use in their analysis. Unfortunately, all the publicly available repositories for geospatial datasets provide a list of datasets with some information about them with no way to explore the datasets beforehand. Through this demonstration, we propose the repository, UCR-Star, that is capable of hosting hundreds of thousands of geospatial datasets that a user can explore visually to judge their quality before even downloading them. This demo provides a deeper dive into the core engine behind UCR-Star. It provides a web interface geared towards database researchers to understand how the index internally works. It provides a comparison interface where the attendees can see side-by-side how two versions of the system work with the ability to customize each of them separately. Finally, the interface reports the response time of the indexes for a quantitative comparison.