Geo-Temporal visualization

I’ve been playing around a bit with Geo-Temporal visualization. Here’s a screenshot of an experimental visualization on Google Maps:

The icons are placed on approximate coordinates; multiple events in a small area are aggregated into a single marker. The red sectors correspond to temporal information: to the right is the current day, a full turn corresponds to a duration of 7 days. Typical events listed on this map cover 1 to 4 hours in the evening of a day, resulting in a rather small sectors in typical angles corresponding to the seven days of a week. There are three larger events, one being a weekend workshop in Hamburg (covering the saturday and sunday sectors), a Friday to Saturday in Leipzig and an event incorrectly set for all tuesday in Dresden. München on the other hand seems to take a day off on Saturday (in fact they have a full-week workshop on Lanzarote, on a part of the map not shown …).

While this visualization is quite fancy and can scale to arbitrary time window, I will not be able to add it to the public version of this map (which can be tried out on http://swing.vitavonni.de/).

The rendering of so many polygons with Google Maps is just way to slow for all the browsers I tried. Maybe I could use cached png images instead and traditional overlays to improve performance.

For some visualizations, it would also make sense to turn the sectors into a spiral, for example where the angle corresponds to the day of the month and the distance from the center corresponds to the month.