**1. Introduction**

For decades, geographic information system (GIS) has expanded its area of applications and services into various fields, from geo-positioning service to three dimensional demonstration and virtual reality. It is a tremendous progress of GIS since its burgeoning as a combination of map and database. Today, everyone in the world is living, working, and resting under the umbrella of GIS applications and services in the form of navigation system, the Google Earth, GPS, and even Pokémon GO.

Stronger and more fundamental changes are asked in GIS development when big data emerged in the early 2010 [1, 2] (see **Figure 1**). Characterized with a large volume, a vast variety, and a fast velocity, big data has been releasing the explosive datasets in social media and other complex platforms. Is big data just good news to the GIS community? According to Sanderson [3], there are still some hurdles that preventing GIS and big data from joining together. They are related with big data's unstructured data structure, real time data production, accuracy, and scale. Not only these obvious limitations of big data, it also neglects locations of datasets frequently. Big data deals mainly with information, not necessarily geography.

What is a pivotal role of big data in GIS development? It is necessary to take a look at a process of big data production to find out a connection between two fields. The big data production process consists of data collection, storage, computing & batching, analysis, and visualization & demonstration. Among the process, visualization and demonstration could provide an effective and efficient way with GIS people in terms of new interpretation and creative advertisement.


#### **Figure 1.**

*Google Trends Search for big data since 2004 to present.*

Big data's several or more visualization tools with their software are creating a lot of wonderful GIS masterpieces recently. Thereafter, I examine those tools and find some implications from them. Can big data visualization overcomes the limitations of GIS and opens a new horizon? This chapter would provide answers to this question.

The followings constitute sub-sections of the chapter.

