Geospatial analysis requires the ability to visualize output. This fact makes tools that can visualize data absolutely critical to the field. There are two categories of geospatial visualization tools.
The first is geospatial viewers and the second is geospatial analysis software. The first category – geospatial viewers—allows you to access, query, and visualize data, but not to edit it in any way. The second category allows you to perform those tasks, and edit the data, too. The main advantage of viewers is that they are typically lightweight pieces of software that launch and load data quickly.
Geospatial analysis software requires far more resources to be able to edit complex geospatial data, so it loads more slowly and often renders data more slowly, in order to provide dynamic editing functionality.
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