Spatiotemporal Visualisation: A Survey and Outlook

Visualisation as a means of communication helps represent massive data sets, exchange knowledge and obtain better understanding of information. Spatiotemporal visualisation concerns changes of information in space and time. It has a natural advantage of revealing overall tendencies and movement patterns. Compared to traditional visual representations, it makes the notion of time accessible to non-expert users, and thus constitutes an important instrument in terms of decision-making that has been used in many application scenarios. As an interdisciplinary approach, substantial progress has been made in different domains, such as geographic information science, visualisation, or visual analytics, but there remains a lot of room for further advancements. In view of this, this paper presents a review of significant research in spatiotemporal visualisation, highlights a general workflow of data acquisition, information modelling and visualisation. Existing work from different domains are introduced, linked to the workflow, and possible integration strategies are given. Inspired by this summary, we also propose future work aiming at improving current spatiotemporal visualisation by integrating visualisation and interaction techniques more tightly.