[Qgis-user] associate timeseries data with point (layer)

[Carson Farmer]

Hello Tim,
> Hello,
> often, geographical data has a time component. Some examples:
> * timeseries of water levels at rain gauges within a catchment area
> * development of a population in a town
>
> Is there already a plugin in place which lets the users associate such
> type of feature data to a geographic feature such as a point (showing
> the location of the rain gauge or the city)?
Are you able to store your data in a PostGIS database? If so, you could 
certainly have tables of your time series, and tables for your 
geographic attributes, and link them together with a common ID or attribute.
>
> I am not talking of the "normal" GIS attribute table because these refer
> to the geographic attribute data. they normally do not contain a time
> component (4 dimesion).
What I've always done in the past is simply stored the time series as a 
series of fields in the attribute table. This only allows you to store a 
time series of a single variable in the table, but if that's all you 
need it works fine. This is what I do for the majority of my spatial 
time-series work when not using PostGIS tables.

Finally, you could certainly do this is R, where you store a time-series 
object in the data.frame of the layer. However, this may not be a viable 
solution for extremely large layers, as the layer (and data) must fit 
into memory.

Cheers,

Carson

-- 
Carson J. Q. Farmer
ISSP Doctoral Fellow
National Centre for Geocomputation (NCG),
Email: Carson.Farmer at gmail.com
Web:   http://www.carsonfarmer.com/
       http://www.ftools.ca/