Dynamic Graphics in a Gis: a Link between Arc/info Tm and Xgobi

This paper describes a link between a Geographical Information System (GIS), ARC/INFO TM , and an interactive dynamic graphics program, XGobi. GISs provide a user with a standard and convenient software for spatial geographical data. In particular, the GIS ARC/INFO is a combination of two systems: ARC maintains the spatial information of map features and provides tools for spatial analyses while INFO maintains the thematic or attribute information associated with the map features. XGobi is an interactive dynamic graphics program for data visualization in the X Window System TM. It is designed for the exploration of multivariate data, primarily by manipulating and displaying scatterplots in arbitrary dimensions. The motivation for the work is to link the dynamic, interactive strengths of XGobi for visualizing high{dimensional data with the exhaustive map handling tools of ARC/INFO, speciically to explore spatial data. This paper presents information about the technical realization of the link between ARC/INFO and XGobi as well as an introductory example of its use.