Spatial Data Processing Engine in a Web Browser Using WebAssembly

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are essential for processing and visualizing spatial data across various fields. Traditional GIS systems, however, face challenges like high costs, the need for specialized hardware, and limited accessibility. WebGIS has emerged as a solution, leveraging web technologies to provide universal access through web browsers. Nonetheless, WebGIS encounters scalability, performance, and data privacy issues. This thesis presents the development of a Spatial Data Processing Engine in a Web Browser using WebAssembly (WASM). The proposed engine addresses these issues by enabling spatial data processing directly within the user's browser, enhancing performance and privacy. By leveraging Rust programming language and WebAssembly, the engine achieves near-native execution speeds, ensuring efficient handling of complex computations and large datasets. Rust's memory safety and concurrency features contribute to the engine's robustness, making it a secure option for processing sensitive geographic data. This work outlines the system architecture, comprising modules for data management, instruction parsing, calculation, and integration with JavaScript. The engine's performance is validated through common-use scenarios, demonstrating that the proposed engine outperforms comparable JavaScript libraries in execution time and sometimes even works as best as the optimized native JS. In conclusion, this project represents a significant advancement in WebGIS technology, making spatial data processing more accessible, efficient, and secure. The engine offers promising implications for future GIS applications, addressing critical challenges and paving the way for more robust and user-friendly geospatial analysis tools.