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NARRAGANSETT, RI. -- Applied Science Associates, Inc. (ASA) announced the next release of its breakthrough extension tool for ESRI’s ArcGIS industry standard GIS software. ASA’s TimeSlider^TM is an extension for ArcGIS 9.1 and now offered for 9.2 that provides functionality to animate feature data that has date and time information. 

When ASA first offered the TimeSlider extension for ArcGIS 9.1 in July, positive response and overwhelming demand ensured that ASA would develop and offer the tool for ArcGIS 9.2 as freeware as soon as possible.  “One of the challenges with managing 2 and 3-dimensional geospatial data is displaying and understanding data as it evolves over time,” explains Eoin Howlett, ASA’s CEO, who recently assigned a dedicated team to expand ASA’s freeware and GIS tools development.  

Many geographically-based phenomena ranging from geological processes to short-term movement of vehicles or marine mammals require temporal analysis. ASA’s TimeSlider extension allows ArcMap users to specify a field that contains date and time information for geographic features. The TimeSlider can manage multiple time-varying layers, including layers that have different time steps.

 

 

The TimeSlider extension has been used to manage time-varying data such as:

 

• Time series observation data from multiple points (e.g. current meters, wind stations, water quality sensors)

• Satellite derived observation data (e.g. sea surface temperature)

• Moving objects (e.g. drifting buoys, vehicles, vessels)

• Numerical model Results (e.g. oil spills, hydrodynamic simulations, sediment transport)

• Intelligent agent models (e.g. bird movement, pandemic outbreak, fish schooling, crowd simulation)

• Emergency personnel and resource deployments

The free installation includes sample time-varying feature data:

• Particles (point features) that represent a simulation of avian flocking behavior over time

• Concentrations (polygon features) that represent concentrations of benzene in a moving air plume

• Surface water currents from a computer model represented as point features with speed and direction attributes

• Oil spill concentrations

• Flood inundation predictions.

“We’ve built and have been using this tool ourselves for a number of key projects related to climate change, oil spill response and maritime search and rescue, and we felt that it could help GIS professionals and scientists using ESRI GIS tools,” Mr. Howlett mentioned as he discussed the coming release of the easily integrated solution.  “It is part of ASA’s core mission to develop and offer tools that integrate GIS and SIS (Science Information Systems),” added ASA’s chief executive officer.

The TimeSlider extension has been made available by ASA for free download and use via the ASA Web site at http://www.asascience.com/timeslider.

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