Web GIS: A new system to store spatial data using GeoJSON in MongoDB

Spatial data is data or information that contains a geographical component. Its representation is considered to be increasingly important in decision-making and it is therefore necessary to guarantee access to spatial data in an easy, intuitive and fast way. The main problems of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are the large amount of information and performance of relational databases (RDBMS) in storage and in unstructured spatial data queries. This problem is significant, since the efficiency of accessing large amounts of spatial data over the Web today is important for conducting on-demand and real-time queries. This work presents a solution to improve efficiency in accessing large amounts of spatial data through the Web, by standardizing spatial data formats. This proposal, called Web GIS, uses the NoSQL MongoDB database engine and provides the spatial data in GeoJSON via a REST API. The results show that MongoDB has substantial advantages over relational databases in storing and querying large amounts of unstructured spatial data, since it supports the storage of data with different structures and also by the efficiency of its spatial operators.