What's GeoTemCo?

The amount of online data annotated with geospatial and temporal metadata has grown rapidly in the recent years. Providers like Flickr and Twitter are popular, but hard to browse. Many systems exist that, in multiple linked views, show the data under geospatial, temporal, and topical aspects. GeoTemCo is a web-application which easily can be utilized to visualize such kind of data, and furthermore, it allows the comparative analysis of several datasets. GeoTemCo consists of several views showing the datas' several dimensions: a map view for the geospatial distribution of items, a time view for the temporal distribution of items and a detail view for the inspection of individual items. A broad range of interaction abilities allows for explorative comparison and analysis of different datasets representing different topics.

GeoTemCo focuses on supporting the user to:

  • analyze and compare temporal trends
  • analyze and compare geospatial distributions
  • detect cooccurences between data items of different datasets
  • compare geospatial migrations of topics over time
  • find causalities between different datasets

Evolution

We started to work on GeoTemCo in September 2009 within a work package of the European project europeana connect. Initially, Ralf Stockmann from the University of Göttingen had the idea of comparing two datasets to each other. In a collaboration with Göttingen, we developed the first version europeana4D that was able to compare four different datasets to each other. Being a hybrid version of GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and JavaScript, several problems occured as we tried to embed europeana4D into other frameworks.
From May 2011 to April 2012, we collaborated with Fraunhofer IAIS in Sankt Augustin to use europeana4D for multiple other projects (e.g. BioVeL). This was a good chance for us to restructure and rewrite parts of the code, and most important, to totally switch to JavaScript as programming language. In context with Fraunhofer projects, the code base was called STIF.
The final broader restructuring steps done in Leipzig ended up in creating an Open Source JavaScript library that we called GeoTemCo. It means that Geospatial-Temporal data of any kind can be visualized and distinct datasets can be Compared to each other.

Thanks ...

... to the colleagues for their collaboration and help to improve GeoTemCo and the friends for their fruitful suggestions and ideas! GeoTemCo likes to thank: Christin Richter, Christian Heine, Ralf Stockmann, Sebastian Bothe, Muhammed Faisal Cheema, Gerik Scheuermann, Vera Hernandez-Ernst, Karl-Heinz Sylla, Christian Mahnke, Cornelius Müller and all the participants of the field experiment!
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