Temporal GIS Seminar: current trends and a vision for meteorological applications

Dr. May Yuan
Associate Professor,
University of Oklahoma

Time: 3:30pm
Location: Foothills Laboratory 1, ATD Atrium

Space and time are essential to the understanding of the dynamic worlds. Unfortunately, GIS development has been focused on 2-D spatial data, and current commercial GIS technology is incapable of handling temporal information. While techniques, such as data animation, are available for users to gain a sense about how changes occur over time, functions are lacking to enable querying and analyzing such changes. For example, meteorologists use looping to gain insights into how a weather system has evolved and forecast how the evolution will continue. A temporal GIS will be able to monitor the evolution and store the evolution in a database so that similar cases can be queried and analyzed to understand their relationships in space and time. Furthermore, these cases can be related to other weather systems, environmental data and socio-economical data for correlation assessment and impact analysis.

This seminar will discuss trends of temporal GIS research and a vision for meteorological applications. We will start with an overview of temporal GIS research with highlights on the conceptual and technological difficulties in the development. Next, we will proceed to thoughts on temporal GIS for meteorological applications: the current state and future opportunities. I invite discussion and comments to contribute toward a more comprehensive vision on temporal GIS for meteorological applications to conclude the seminar.