Rethinking the usage and experience of clustering markers in web mapping
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Human-Computer Interaction, Spatial and Geographic Information Systems
- Keywords
- Clustering, Web mapping, Geospatial visualisations, Map-based mashups, map density visualisations, clutter reduction method, perceived performance, Icon aggregation, Information filtering, Icon cluttering
- Copyright
- © 2019 Fürhoff
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. Rethinking the usage and experience of clustering markers in web mapping. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27858v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27858v1
Abstract
Although the notion of ‘too many markers’ have been mentioned in several research, in practice, displaying hundreds of Points of Interests (POI) on a web map in two dimensions with an acceptable usability remains a real challenge. Web practitioners often make an excessive use of clustering aggregation to overcome performance bottlenecks without successfully resolving issues of perceived performance. This paper tries to bring a broad awareness by identifying sample issues which describe a general reality of clustering, and provide a pragmatic survey of potential technologies optimisations. At the end, we discuss the usage of technologies and the lack of documented client-server workflows, along with the need to enlarge our vision of the various clutter reduction methods.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.