Dynamic Visualization of Geospatial Data on Small Screen Mobile Devices

Vector-based geographic datasets are widely used as a source of data for Location-based Services (LBS) applications. However these datasets are often very large and it is a challenge for mobile devices to access this spatial data remotely especially with poor Internet connectivity. In these applications when users perform spatial operations on the small screen it is very resource intensive to pre-load large scale map representations for processing and visualization using the limited computation capability of the mobile device. In this paper we discuss the development of a flexible clipping method to help reduce the amount of unnecessary data for querying of large scale spatial data on mobile devices in LBS. A multi-resolution data structure is then described associated with a progressive transmission strategy. Clipped levels of detail can be efficiently delivered for quick processing and rendering on the small display. A discussion of this approach is provided which shows the potential usability of this clipping approach in spatial queries for LBS.