Because progress in geographic information systems (GIS) technology has historically relied on a fragmented gathering of approaches inherited from cartography, imposed by hardware, or borrowed from other computer-related fields, we are faced with the current situation in which (1) GIS still live in a static world, focusing on the spatial, but ignoring the temporal dimension, and (2) the initial promise of true analytical capability within an integrated environment that truly combines the computational power of computers with the perceptual powers of the human user has still not been fully realized almost 40 years after the first GIS became operational.
While filtering through vast amounts of data now available to find patterns and associations requires new analytical techniques, it also requires new ways to represent the data. Effective use of heterogeneous and multidimensional data collections for undirected investigative discovery, as well as more directed analyses, requires an integrated approach for organizing evidence in a way that facilitates the task of the human user. Such an integrated approach must combine a multi-representation database strategy with diverse but coordinated visualization strategies within a unified conceptual scheme so that large volumes of complex information can be analyzed and synthesized.
In the talk, I will first describe some current issues relating to space-time representation on a conceptual level, and then introduce the approach used in a prototype integrated space-time database-visualization system currently under development relating to those issues.