Innovative Software Development in GIS

Chapter 5

GENGHIS: an Environment for the Generation of Spatiotemporal Visualization Interfaces

5.1. Introduction

The integration of historical and temporal data in geographical information systems creates issues of methodological and technological natures. Creating spatiotemporal information systems (STIS) requires us to go through design, modeling, and implementation stages that require specific developments. These can be major and time-consuming developments, and even require the intervention of computer specialists. To this day, there are few IT platforms able to help a designer through the different stages of STIS development, from the modeling to the generation of the STIS, while taking into account the geovisualization interface specifications to be implemented.

The GENGHIS platform (Generator of Geographical and Historical Information Systems), developed by the STEAMER team of the Grenoble Computer Science Laboratory, aims to offer a solution to this issue. The goal is to offer a computer environment able to help the designer during the modeling and creation of an STIS which is adapted to his/her needs. GENGHIS is in line with an approach capitalizing on various research works that have been previously carried out by the STEAMER team on the design and creation of STIS devoted to the representation of spatiotemporal phenomena.

After describing the context in which GENGHIS has been developed (section 5.2), we will present its main functionalities (sections 5.3 and 5.4) as ...