ABSTRACT
The theoretical and conceptual facets of temporal geographic information systems (GIS) design must join with the realities and limitations of technology to produce a realistic strategy for implementation. Clustering, volume, and error are the most apparent barriers to overcome for temporal GIS to become a reality. A temporal GIS faces a broad spectrum of possible data configurations and queries, all under the auspices of ‘spatiotemporal’. Dimensional dominance highlights how differently applications will use a temporal GIS. The GIS community has only recently begun to face the dilemmas involved in general-purpose data sets. The ways to control data volume include carefully selecting an appropriate temporal resolution, partitioning the data into epochs, and establishing retirement guidelines so the most active data are also the most accessible. Temporal data makes the task of quality control more difficult because it adds to the data’s complexity.
