At CartoDB, it is our goal to give our users the tools necessary to create compelling visualizations with their data. We are continuously looking for new innovative technologies that will enable data-driven storytelling.
Visualizing Big Data on maps presents a tough set of challenges. A lot of our work focuses on how to make it easier while maintaining flexibility. Perhaps the hardest challenge we face, is how to visualize temporal data on maps. It adds the obvious difficulties of dimension and non-static content, not to mention transfer size. We are developing performant solutions for time based maps that will be included in the upcoming CartoDB 2.0.
These tools we are building into CartoDB will lower the bar for any of our users to make better dynamic temporal maps of their data. Today, we want to share some of the technology we are using to do this.
Introducing Torque
Torque allows you to create beautiful visualizations with big temporal datasets by bundling HTML5 browser rendering technologies with a generic and efficient temporal data transfer format created using the CartoDB SQL API. Torque visualisations work on desktop and ipads, and work well on temporal datasets with hundreds of thousands or even millions of datapoints. In anticipation of theStrata Conference starting this week in London, we have prepared some examples to share.Simon Tokumine will be there, so ping us for a private demo there.