TimeTrails: A System for Exploring Spatio-Temporal Information in Documents

Spatial and temporal data have become ubiquitous in many application domains such as the Geosciences or life sciences. Sophisticated database management systems are employed to manage such structured data. However, an important source of spatio-temporal information that has not been fully utilized are unstructured text documents. In documents, combinations of temporal and spatial expressions form events, which can be mapped to a database structure and organized into trajectories that can be explored. In this context, the coupling of information retrieval techniques with spatio-temporal database concepts leads to new ways for managing and exploring document collections. In this demonstration, we present TimeTrails, a system for the extraction, querying, storage, and exploration of spatiotemporal information embedded in text documents. The user can query a document collection, and TimeTrails visualizes the spatio-temporal information extracted from relevant documents as document trajectories, resulting in a map-based view of documents. This view helps the user to explore the temporal and spatial content of documents in a meaningful way and to further restrict search results using spatial and temporal predicates.