Abstract:
This work addresses the problem on lack of supported tool for visualizing temporal geographic data on web mapping applications. While spatial data can be structured as a data pyramid and selectively visualized using the zoom control on a web map viewer, temporal property of the data may be supported with a basic timeline control without data selection capability. Therefore, a large amount of dynamic data over a long period of time can clutter the screen. The proposed solution is to apply the multi-resolution technique for visualizing spatial data onto temporal data. That is to create a data pyramid based on the time-scale instead of the altitude-level and map-viewer software with a timeline control interface that is zoom-able to different time-scales. A prototype system is implemented as a web mapping application with a specialized timeline control that interacts with the database containing the spatial-temporal data pyramid.
