Repository navigation
Use Case (content author): Include animated spatial data in a layer #182
Description
This issue is for discussion of the use case “Include animated spatial data in a layer”, its examples & list of required capabilities.
A common use for Web maps is to show how the distribution of a phenomenon changes over time, and animation of layers is quite useful, for example in weather radar maps.
WMS has support for time and elevation dimensions.
There are Leaflet plugins that support animation, this one supports a time slider approach.
My colleagues developed a similar animated map approach using maps for HTML.
I'm sure there are lots of other examples. Can we figure out what the 'primitives' are that will allow us to animate layers using the standard facilities of maps in HTML (+ CSS + ??), and those primitives will enable composition to more sophisticated use cases.
Activity
AmeliaBR commentedon Oct 3, 2019
Renaming this as a Use Case so that we can discuss more broadly and figure out what the underlying capabilities should look like.
[-]Capability: Animated layers[/-][+]Use Case (content author): Include animated spatial data in a layer[/+]ccancellieri commentedon Mar 18, 2020
Please, consider that the WMS also defines node in the getCapabilities which should be supported for custom dimensions f.e.:
The standard defines a way to specify the custom dimensions in addition to the 'elevation' and 'time' dimensions.
WMS 1.1.0 defines the way to query these additional dimensions:
using
DIM_<DIMENSION_NAME>=<VALUE>f.e. in Arcgis but this can be done also in the same way in geoserver.
Please note that this is VERY useful to query and show complex cube of geospatial data stored in NetCDF, Grib, Pyramids etc file formats.
References:
prushforth commentedon Mar 16, 2026
In experimenting with NASA GIBS services for EO data, it's clear that an animation timeline is going to need to support thousands of individual time points. Here's an example of a data layer that has has thousands of individual time values, from that dataset. It's clear that simply mapping individual points in time to values in a
selectis not going to work; it's going to require a (time) input with a syntax similar to the<Dimension>element below.