The Visual Representations of Territorial Dynamics: Retrospective and Input from New Computing Environments

Nowadays, a diverse number of cartographical products are attempting to integrate the notion of time in their map views, through animated cartography and geovisualization platforms. These questions about representing time and timescales are not new. Many visual solutions have been proposed to carry out reasoning on both space and time in a very efficient and effective way. These representations of spatial dynamics constitute a heritage for modern visualizations. They can be classified in three families of practice: chronography (time oriented), cartography (space oriented) and statistics (theme oriented). This article deals with a review of past and current spatio-temporal visualizations. We first proposed a review of past approaches in spatio-temporal visualizations. We tried to determine how this whole heritage constitutes the foundations of modern cartographical exploration. Second, we analyzed a set of 42 dynamic cartographical visualizations on the Web on the basis of 13 criteria, which covered proposed functional features, semiological innovations and services rendered. This analysis revealed common associations of parameters and trends among current webmaps showing dynamics, but also a low diversity of certain dimensions of webmaps. We finally positioned them into MacEachren's " map-use cube " (1994), which is a frame of reference for geovisualizations analysis. Two new categories were intergrated in the cube, which superseded others in the webmaps case: maps for data contextualization and maps for data presentation.