A Content Management System for Spatio-Temporal Data: Tadaima

This thesis focuses on spatio-temporal data modeling and visualization with an application case of study in the Cultural Heritage field. Spatio-temporal data visualization assumes an important role presenting data to users. Offering a synchronized view on three dimensions of data (i.e. descriptive, temporal and spatial) helps users in their knowledge discovery process. In Cultural Heritage field, time assumes an important role to explore data. The same timeline could be viewed in different thematic contexts, temporal domain could be stratified and the time reference could be qualitative and imprecise. Managing this kind of features improves the ability of the users to recognize patterns in data. This thesis presents a framework oriented to the manipulation of Spatio-Temporal data with a particular attention to the temporal specification needs of the Cultural Heritage context, producing a prototype of a Content Management System (CMS). The proposed framework exploits the RDF technology for definition and manipulation of (meta-) data and adopts the OGC standards and open source technologies (PostGIS, Geoserver and Openlayers) for encoding, representing and retrieving spatial information. The available Spatio-Temporal metaphors are parametric, so users can personalize them depending on the specific application context and needs. A real case study in the Cultural Heritage field, concerning spatio-temporal information contained in literary Latin and Greek texts referred to the geographic area of Campi Flegrei (Naples, Italy), describes the framework functionalities.