![]() It’s better to have local timestamps, even if everything is stored in UTM or UTC. This is the only reliable format to sort dates.Īnother complication comes with time zones, especially for datasets spread across multiple geographic regions. I recommend sticking to the ISO standard timestamp format: Year, month, and day. Think of the American Standard, for example: Month, day, and year. There are way too many conventions for how to store time information. One thing to note when using time data is that the use of ISO timestamp format is generally recommended, as it makes it easier to analyze and exchange data. Meanwhile, NetCDF-a more sophisticated file format typically used for meteorological and ocean data-has native time information support, making it easy to automate visualizations. With raster data files, time information is usually put into the file name. In the vector data file type, you can add timestamps as attributes, either in the metadata or simply in the layer name. Many GIS file formats support the collection of time data-in fact all of them can work with temporal information to some extent, but some do it more natively than others. How is temporal information stored and modelled? ![]() Anita is one of the pioneers in this area, having developed the acclaimed Time Manager plugin for QGIS, back in 2011, to bridge the gap in how traditional GIS handles the temporal dimension. When researching this topic I found a great podcast from Mapscaping which featured GIS legend Anita Graser discussing the subject. Perhaps you might want to know what kinds of patterns can be extracted from object trajectories, for example-but how do you extract the information and knowledge you need from the data available to you? If you have ever tried to find the answer to this question, you will immediately understand that GIS is really in its infancy when it comes to temporal analytics. ![]() But although terms such as ‘spatiotemporal’, ‘real-time’ and ‘situational awareness’ are commonly used when thinking about modern applications of geospatial tech, the truth is that the fourth dimension has been ignored by GIS standards for a long time…Īnyone who has worked with timestamps, even in an Excel sheet, will know that there are dozens of different conventions for date and time, and it’s painful to work with them-every time you need to work with time, things get complicated!Īnother issue is analyzing the time dimension in spatial data. ![]() Everything happens not just somewhere, but also sometime-which in GIS terms could be translated to 3D and 4D. ![]()
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