A Split Smart Swap Clustering for Clutter Problem in Web Mapping System

The development of location-based applications raises a new challenge to manage and visualize large amounts of geo-tags presented on a web map. The visualization of the geo-tags often leads to a clutter problem, especially in web-mapping systems. We present a new clustering method to reduce the amount of visual clutter. A split smart swap strategy, which has the advantage that it can be applied to a certain data only once at all map scales, is employed in the method. We compare the proposed method to several other methods. Taking the advantage of the one-time running offline, the proposed method is more applicable for the clutter problem.