Gist: a New Tool for Visualizing Geographic Data

This paper describes the motivation behind the development of, and the features included in, a pure Java Geographic Information System (GIS) tool for geospatial data analysis and visualization. The use of existing GISs is often limited by issues such as platform-dependence, cost, and inability to support time-varying and/or 3-dimensional data. With the GIS Tool (GIST), we seek to combine traditional GIS features with additional features, such as animating data, extracting slices of data from three-dimensional data sets, and computing and plotting the results of mathematical functions. As a result, GIST will be portable, powerful, and useful for many different types of applications that use geospatial data – such as the analysis of multimedia model, air quality model and emissions inventory data. GIST will have the flexibility to be deployed as both a desktop application for powerful interactive analysis, and as an applet to facilitate information dissemination over the Web. Basic features include setting and changing map projections, adding and deleting layers, and probing. More advanced features are also implemented such as probing attributes, thematic mapping, query building and execution. Future directions such as animation and formulas are described.