Graphical representations to illustrate basic concepts of spatial access structures or to explain the behaviour of such data structures are widely used, not only in the relevant literature. Although computer-based tools to create such visualizations can be a valuable help for presentation, analysis or even for debugging of such access structures, to our knowledge no such tool is yet available. As the first approach in this direction, in this paper we present VisTool, a tool for visualizing spatial access structures. Using VisTool, users can visualize such access structures in their static state or observe their evolution during a sequence of operations by choosing some appropriate visualization method. Different spatial access structure implementations can easily be integrated into VisTool, which also serves as an operationally uniform testing environment. The user interface of VisTool has two main components: the control board and one or more Vis Tool windows. The control board allows users to interact with spatial access structures using the set of operations (e.g. create, insert, query, etc.) given by the access structure implementations. Vis Tool windows are X window front-ends which allow visualization, based on a library of visualization methods, of selected aspects of spatial access structures. This paper discusses the basic concepts, the design and implementation and the use of Vis Tool. Since Vis Tool is an ongoing project, we also present further extensions to be made to Vis Tool in the future.
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