CET-LATS: Compressing Evolution of TINs from Location Aware Time Series

Abstract

In this paper, we present the CET-LATS (Compressing Evolution of TINs from Location Aware Time Series) system, which enables testing the impacts of various compression approaches on evolving Triangulated Irregular Networks (TINs). Specifically, we consider the settings in which values measured in distinct locations and at different time instants, are represented as time series of the corresponding measurements, generating a sequence of TINs. Different compression techniques applied to location-specific time series may have different impacts on the representation of the global evolution of TINs - depending on the distance functions used to evaluate the distortion. CET-LATS users can view and analyze compression vs. (im)precision trade-offs over multiple compression methods and distance functions, and decide which method works best for their application. We also provide an option to investigate the impact of the choice of a compression method on the quality of prediction. Our prototype is a web-based system using Flask, a lightweight Python framework, relying on Apache Spark for data management and JSON files to communicate with the front-end, enabling extensibility in terms of adding new data sources as well as compression techniques, distance functions and prediction methods.