1 Introduction
Advanced sensing technologies and computing infrastructures have produced a variety of trajectory data of humans and vehicles in urban spaces. Taxi trajectory data records realtime moving paths sampled as a series of positions associated with vehicle attributes over urban road networks. Massive trajectory data contains abundant knowledge about a city and its citizens which has been widely used in urban computing [40]. Exploratory visualization systems are demanded to study taxi trajectories with efficient user interaction and instant visual feedback. However, users often need to select, brush, and filter regions on maps to interact with GPS points and trajectory paths. Complex operations are needed to complete some straightforward tasks. We give two scenarios as examples:
Scenario 1: A shopping mall has a plan to open shuttle buses for their customers. Its manager wants to investigate where and when visitors take taxis to the mall.
Task 1: “For the taxi trips arriving at the shopping mall, what are their major pick-up locations? “
Scenario 2: Two witnesses reported a criminal suspect taking a taxi passing South Street and North Street between 3pm and 3:20pm. A policeman wants to find suspicious taxi paths. Task 2: “What are the taxi trips passing South Street and North Street between 3pm and 3:20pm? What are the other streets/POIs they visited?”