A distributed map animation framework for spatiotemporal datasets.

Maps are an excellent way to present data that have spatial components. However, when the data being presented vary over time, a simple two-dimensional map ignores an important feature of the data. An animated map that shows a series of two-dimensional maps at successive points in time allows one to add a time dimension to the display of data. The current study proposes a distributed service-oriented architecture to create map animations from spatiotemporal datasets. We extend the open standards GIS web services definitions with a topic-based publish-subscribe paradigm, which best suits the animation requirements. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated in an exploratory data analysis of Turkey's earthquake seismic data records at the end of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]