Development of a Web-Based Geographical Information System for Interactive Visualization and Analysis of Container Itineraries

The paper describes an advanced prototype of a webbased geographical information system enabling interactive, efficient and user-friendly visualization of the movement of containers travelling around the world. The prototype presents the information stored in the ConTraffic database which contains currently more than one billion records. In order to allow the user to browse and visualize data from such a huge geographical dataset the prototype system implements four different selection mechanisms and three different presentation methods, one of which is the geographical visualization on a map of the locations where the container events were recorded. Key features of the system include the visualization on the map of critical aspects of the data and the semantic summarization of the records while allowing the user to drill-down to all the details available. Risk analysts dealing with the container traffic can use the system through a regular web browser and easily find and understand the information they are looking for. Such a system is expected to allow them to make better and faster decisions. The prototype has been implemented based on the client-server approach using several web programming languages and state-of-the art APIs while remaining flexible and easily adaptable to other similar domains of moving objects. Keywords-component; Web GIS, web-based geographical information system, interactive visualization, visualization of multidimentional data, container movements, container trajectory.