VisualEyes is an online tool developed at the University of Virginia. It allows you to combine images, maps, charts, video and data into interactive dynamic visualizations.
The examples offer multiple map layers, charts and of course a time slider to navigate through time.
VisualEyes example: Jefferson's Travels to England
Check out: www.viseyes.org.
Kudos to radek at gis.stackexchange.com.
The aim of Time Manager plugin for QGIS is to provide comfortable browsing through temporal geodata. A dock widget provides a time slider and a configuration dialog for your layers to manage.
a wildlife telemetry dataset managed by Time Manager
Time Manager filters your vector datasets and displays only features with timestamps in the user specified time frame.
two views of the scenery, using a two-days time frame
Give it a try! The project website can be found at http://anitagraser.github.com/TimeManager/.
I just stumbled upon this interesting piece of code for visualization of network flow on gis.stackexchange.com: It’s called “Flow Map Layout” and was developed at Standford University (project page).
Flow Map Layout mapped on a globe
The corresponding paper describes the methodology and shows interesting example uses.
Free and Open Source GIS Ramblings 