A distributed map animation framework for spatiotemporal datasets

Abstract

Maps are an excellent way to present data that have spatial components. However, when the data being presented vary over time, a simple two-dimensional map ignores an important feature of the data. An animated map that shows a series of two-dimensional maps at successive points in time allows one to add a time dimension to the display of data. The current study proposes a distributed service-oriented architecture to create map animations from spatiotemporal datasets. We extend the open standards GIS web services definitions with a topic-based publish-subscribe paradigm, which best suits the animation requirements. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated in an exploratory data analysis of Turkey s earthquake seismic data records at the end of the paper.