GeoClustering: A Web Service for Geospatial Clustering

Geospatial clustering is a very important research topic in the field of „Geospatial Knowledge Discovery.‟ Its main purpose is to group similar objects, from large geospatial datasets, into clusters, based on the objects‟ spatial and non-spatial attributes. This capability is very useful for better understanding the patterns and distributions of geographical phenomena. With the emerging availability of large amounts of geospatial data on the Internet, the demand for powerful methods of extracting meaningful information from large amounts of web-based geospatial data is thus also rapidly increasing. In this chapter, we present a geospatial clustering web service called GeoClustering. With this service, users are able to cluster online data sources easily and to then conveniently visualize the clustering results through a friendly map-centric user interface. Since it is web-based, GeoClustering offers a platform that can be accessed by anyone from anywhere at any time. To achieve better interoperability, GeoClustering offers an API and follows the OGC standard data format for spatial data exchange.