GeoDia (short for "geodiachronicity") is intended to provide a simple, intuitive way for people to visualize information with both temporal and spatial components. It has grown out of two projects: one is Nick Rabinowitz's timemap.js mashup of MIT's Simile timeline and Google Maps APIs, and the other is a project to develop an interactive spatial-temporal map of ancient Mediterranean archaeological sites, periodized and linked to image resources, sponsored by Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services at the University of Texas at Austin.

In its pilot version, it will present a large number of geolocated archaeological sites, with their temporal dimension divided into archaeological/art-historical periods and categorized according to the "archaeological cultures" that occupied them, and with image resources drawn from LAITS's DASe (Digital Archives Services) framework and attached to the sites by period. The sites, and the objects and monuments associated with them, represent those most frequently referenced in college-level archaeology and art-history textbooks. The interface is meant to allow the dataset to be filtered by region, culture, and period.

This pilot version, with its defined dataset, is meant to serve as an instructional resource, to help students in introductory courses in archaeology and art-history make sense of the spatial, temporal and visual complexity of the ancient Mediterranean, and see both connections and differences across space and time. Moving forward, we intend to build a simple interface for user-generated spatio-temporal content, including image resources from UT collections. This user-generated content interface will allow faculty to create on-line resources for their students; we also intend to build the capacity for it to be used as a study aid, in which students themselves can place a defined set of objects and monuments in time and space.

Working version: http://geodia.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/index.html