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Title: A CLEAR TEMPORAL GIS VIEWER AND SOFTWARE FOR DISCOVERING IRREGULARITIES IN HISTORICAL GIS
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2013
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Abstract: Temporal GIS is important for history, and many other areas in the humanities, social sciences, and beyond. Yet as of 2009 the only known viewer for temporal GIS data appeared to be Google Earth. Lex Berman [1], who engineered the pioneering data model and software for CHGIS, wrote, “Now we can browse through hundreds, or thousands of years of Historical GIS objects, ... Interestingly, the temporal browsing functionality is only possible using a free software application, GoogleEarth, ...., but cannot be done with any of the major commercial GIS packages.” I also viewed the CHGIS dataset on Google Earth, and found it to be awkward and confusing (Fig. 1). When used with the two time-series provincial data files of CHGIS, the display is often too messy to comprehend precisely. The labeling is very poor, with the names of the capitals showing only in Chinese characters unless a placemark is moused over. Surprisingly, even though the time resolution of the CHGIS time series database is 1 year, Google Earth only seems to be able to display data sometimes every 7 years (such as 373, 380, 387,...) and sometimes every 8 years (such as the gap between 1490 and 1498). There are definitely temporal points in the database itself that lie on years that Google Earth apparently can't display, despite my attempts to set software preferences and to also look in the database files, in vain, to see if there are instructions telling Google Earth to skip or not to skip years. Not having found documentation indicating the contrary, I would venture a guess that designers of Google Earth skipped years in order to reduce the data handling load. Finally, when asked to animate the map by running through the years, Google Earth animates the map at a speed that is far too quick for the eyes to comprehend, even at the slowest speed setting [1]. This is not too surprising since Google Earth was probably not created specifically for Historical GIS, and also because of the year skipping mentioned earlier.
User Submitted?: No
Authors: Kantabutra, Vitit
Publisher: Idaho State University
Data Collections: IPUMS NHGIS
Topics: Other
Countries: United States