The era of big spatial data

The recent explosion in the amount of spatial data calls for specialized systems to handle big spatial data. In this paper, we discuss the main features and components that needs to be supported in a system to handle big spatial data efficiently. We review the recent work in the area of big spatial data according to these four components, namely, language, indexing, query processing, and visualization. We describe each component, in details, and give examples of how it is implemented in existing work. After that, we describe a few case studies of systems for big spatial data and show how they support these four components. This assists researchers in understanding the different design approaches and highlights the open research problems in this area. Finally, we give examples of real applications that make use of these systems to handle big spatial data.