A survey of tools for visualizing geo spatial data

In the last few years in addition to analyzing data in time domain (time series data), analytics in space domain has gained equal prominence. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) play a key role in analyzing and visualizing spatial data. In this paper we study 3 different license free GIS tools namely Quantum GIS, gvSIG and GRASS GIS.We compare and evaluate them in terms of support for third party development. We also demonstrate the use of GIS tools to analyze and visualize spatial data. We find Quantum GIS tool to be feature rich compared to other tools and use it to analyze spatial data related to earthquakes and ATM deployment.