Visualization System of Spatial-temporal Information for Historic Sites Based on Gis

A historic site shows different times in a space by reflecting the social values, economic conditions, and culture of a particular period. However, current paper-based static documents, such as descriptive lists, words, and simple marked maps, for describing the historic sites are lack the capability to depict the meanings and changes of the historic sites in a spatial and temporal manner. When integrated with advanced visualization tools, GIS can become a very effective tool for analyzing and representing complex data. The event-based spatial-temporal data model (ESTDM) that has recently been proposed by Peuquet and Duan (1995) is useful in representing the spatial-temporal database. However, in the ESTDM, each event representation is static and fragmented, even though it must still be captured and integrated in a temporal manner. Therefore, in this paper, we discuss the visualization of spatial-temporal information as a way of describing and representing the past in several historic sites. We focus on improving the socalled “ST-ESTDM” (Smooth-Timing Event-based Spatial-Temporal Data Model) to overcome the disadvantage of ESTDM mentioned above. We develop a GIS-based system prototype for Taiwanese historic sites to exemplify our concepts and methodology.