The overall goal of the Humanitics project, financed mainly by the Swiss National Science Foundation, is to develop visual analytics tools for public organizations to enhance collaborative knowledge discovery, information exchange and communication.

It was initiated as a collaboration between the University of Fribourg and the United Nations in Geneva. Each year, the United Nation manipulates and reports numerous data and information concerning world-wide health, illicit drug trade, environment and global climate change, diseases, energy, conflict, and humanitarian development concerns.

The increasing adoption of video surveillance makes it possible to watch over sensitive areas and identify people responsible for damage, theft and violence. However, when such events are not detected immediately, the subsequent video analysis can be a long and tedious task. In this article is presented a technique that allows a human investigator to focus only on those parts of a video showing the event as it unfolds, and so helping to save on the time needed to identify and understand how it happened. The presented technique creates a single interactive image of the whole video that shows everything that happened in the scene.

The research focusses on methods and techniques to integrate data from different sources and dimensions (2D, 3D, Time). The data are offered via a variety of map representations in multi-functional visual (online) environments that allow exploration and data analysis. To justify the solutions produced, usability research is an integral part of the activities.

Geographic data is characterized by a locational, attribute and temporal component. The time component can be a typical indicator of change of all sorts. For instance, movement data holds information about where the movement took place (the path), what was moving (the object), and especially when it was moving (the time frame). Examples are travel time between cities, the daily trips of commuters, or the possible average speed along a path etc.