This demo shows our original user interface.
See instructions for using the applet below, or click the help button. If the applet doesn't work, you can download the jar file and run it as a stand-alone application. If the file is called "map.jar", simply run "java -jar map.jar". The client program must make a TCP socket connection to the server on port 44557; this might be prevented by some firewalls.
We hope you will find this demo useful as well as fun. You will see a map of the contiguous portion of the United States, the "Lower 48" states. You get *continuous* zooming and panning. Moreover, the zooming is potentially unlimited. This demo is evolving, and your feedback would be appreciated.
Our research goal is thinwire visualization of large GIS datasets. Such datasets have rather different properties than, say, purely geometric datasets (such as in CAD applications or simulation output). In particular, simplification hierarchies are much harder to construct automatically. The large size and large scale pose additional problems. Efficient algorithms for pre-processing and querying such datasets is another research topic which is central to modern GIS applications. Finally, issues of human-computer interfaces (HCI) are actively pursued.
The data is the United States Census Bureau's TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) data. It is geographic data in vector format that covers the United States.
This research is conducted by Ken Been, Chee Yap, Zilin Du, Yan Koyfman and Zubin Girglani.