Interactive Temporal Zoom and Pan within a Multi-Touch Geovisual Analytics Environment

The visual analysis of spatio-temporal data in a geospatial application can be a challenging task since these systems primarily focus on mapping and exploration of the spatial dimension of data, and may not fully exploit the temporal component. This paper proposes two methods for zooming and panning through temporal data at multiple temporal resolutions within a multi-touch geovisual analytics environment. The first method uses multiple linked time sliders allowing analysts to interactively zoom by selecting data at different levels of temporal resolution. The second method combines a main time slider with a dynamic radial navigation tool for temporal zooming. Both approaches support panning within the coarsest resolution of data without adjusting the selection at the finer temporal resolutions, and the analysts have the option of zooming in to as many levels of resolution as are contained within their datasets. The approaches were implemented in a multi-touch geovisual analytics software prototype.