WMS-Based Flow Mapping Services

Flow Mapping, also known as spatial interaction data visualization, has become widely used for exploratory spatiotemporal data analysis to understand complex spatial phenomena such as human migration, commercial trading, and social networks. The unitary flow mapping architecture, in which data storing, computing and representation are deployed in a single computer, is facing the challenges being brought from increasing data scale, higher timing demand, computing complexity of visual clutter detecting and integrating with other GIS and spatio-temporal analysis tools. In this paper, a novel 3-tiers flow mapping service architecture is proposed. In this architecture, flow data integration tier provide a unified data access interface for variant data sources; flow mapping models tier provide a computing resource pool to support different flow mapping algorithms and scalable computing capability; and result visualization tier to view map interactively. In this paper, we expand the OGC Web Map Services (WMS) standard protocol to support spatio-temporal interaction data visualization and analytics, and integrate WMS-based flow mapping service with other map resources by JavaScript toolkits in browsers. This architecture is validate to be improved in performance and scalability by three typical application cases.