Spatiotemporal correlation in WebGIS group-user intensive access patterns

ABSTRACT

Group-user intensive access to WebGIS exhibits spatiotemporal behaviour patterns with aggregation features and regularity distributions when geospatial data are accessed repeatedly over time and aggregated in certain spatial areas. We argue that these observable group-user access patterns provide a foundation for improved optimization of WebGIS so that it can respond to volume intensive requests with a higher quality of service and improve performance. Subsequently, a measure of access popularity distribution must precisely reflect the access aggregation and regularity features found in group-user intensive access. In our research, we considered both the temporal distribution characteristics and spatial correlation in the access popularity of tiled geospatial data (tiles). Based on the observation that group-user access follows a Zipf-like law, we built a tile-access popularity distribution based on time-sequence, to express the access aggregation of group-users with heavy-tailed characteristics. Considering the spatial locality of user-browsed tiles, we built a quantitative expression for the correlation between tile-access popularities and the distances to hotspot tiles, reflecting the attenuation of tile-access popularity to distance. Moreover, given the geographical spatial dependency and scale attribute of tiles, and the time-sequence of tile-access popularity, we built a Poisson regression model to express the degree of correlation among the accesses to adjacent tiles at different scales, reflecting the spatiotemporal correlation in tile access patterns. Experiments verify the accuracy of our Poisson regression model, which we then applied to a cluster-based cache-prefetching scenario. The results show that our model successfully reflects the spatiotemporal aggregation features of group-user intensive access and group-user behaviour patterns in WebGIS. The refined mathematical method in our model represents a time-sequence distribution of intensive access to tiles and the spatial aggregation and correlation in access to tiles at different scales, quantitatively expressing group-user spatiotemporal behaviour patterns with aggregation features and a regular distribution. Our proposed model provides a precise and empirical basis for performance-optimization strategies in WebGIS services, such as planning computing resource allocation and utilization, distributed storage of geospatial data, and providing distributed services so as to respond rapidly to geospatial data requests, thus addressing the challenges of volume-intensive user access.

KEYWORDS:

• Poisson regression
• time-sequence
• Zipf-like
• spatiotemporal
• WebGIS

Acknowledgement

The authors thank National Geomatics Center of China and ‘TIANDITU’ for supporting this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 41371370] and the National Key Basic Research and Development Program of China [grant number 2012CB719906].