Dissemination and geovisualization of territorial entities' history

Abstract

This paper describes an innovative solution for geovisualization of the demographic and administrative history of French municipalities, named "communes" in French. This solution allows for the open dissemination of such data. The challenge is to provide a web interface for unskilled users in order to help them understand complex information about the demographic evolution of French territories. Our approach combines interactive thematic, spatial, and temporal views. We describe our architecture, based on open-source technologies, and the organization of this imperfect geo-historical information in our spatiotemporal database. Our second contribution concerns the concept of an acquaintance graph that has been used to obtain an efficient design with good performance in our geovisualization website.

Keywords

• geovisualization
• web mapping
• spatiotemporal databases
• imperfect data
• census data
• historical GIS
• spatial events