Temporal Geographic Information System and Its Application to Transportation

While geographic information systems (GIS) have proven to be powerful tools that are capable of storing, displaying, and analyzing spatially distributed information, current GIS lack adequate capabilities for handling temporal information. As a result, analyses are mostly performed assuming a fixed time point. Longitudinal analyses that take time into consideration cannot be easily accomplished. For many applications, information constantly changes in both space and time. A temporal GIS, one that is capable of handling temporal as well as spatial information, will greatly expand the current GIS applications and allow new information to be obtained. Some preliminary results are presented of an ongoing study of a temporal GIS. To explore the problems and potential benefits of a temporal GIS, a simple method has been developed to record the changes in spatial objects for time using personal computer ARC/INFO relational databases as well as a set of commands to query the spatiotemporal data. The use of this temporal GIS method is illustrated using an example of transit service analysis.