Spatio-temporal aggregation for visual analysis of movements

Data about movements of various objects are collected in growing amounts by means of current tracking technologies. Traditional approaches to visualization and interactive exploration of movement data cannot cope with data of such sizes. In this research paper we investigate the ways of using aggregation for visual analysis of movement data. We define aggregation methods suitable for movement data and find visualization and interaction techniques to represent results of aggregations and enable comprehensive exploration of the data. We consider two possible views of movement, traffic-oriented and trajectory-oriented. Each view requires different methods of analysis and of data aggregation. We illustrate our argument with example data resulting from tracking multiple cars in Milan and example analysis tasks from the domain of city traffic management.