The Flightschedule Profiler: An Attempt to Synthetise Visually an Airport's Flight Offer in Time and Space

摘要

Online route planners and travel reservations systems have become in the past years part of our everyday lives. Such sites, originating from the airlines themselves or oriented on "search and compare" tasks, do provide valuable services. But the very nature of the queries users formulate (ultimate result: one flight) limits the type of information one can expect to retrieve, and in particular does not allow to get an overall view of an airport's flight offer over time and in space. In this contribution we introduce a proof-of-concept visualisation that sums up in a synthetic way the [where to, when to] profile of an airport, its realm of possibilities. The visualisation acts as an upstream service, independently of any actual reservation loop: its main role is to help unveiling significant spatio-temporal patterns (densities and continuity over time for instance). The prototype is implemented on a real life data set: the winter 2013/2014 schedule of the airport in Nice. Ultimately, beyond a discussion on the issue, on the pluses and minuses of the prototype, this position paper questions the way travel data is presented, and as such can promote debates over the potential impact of information visualisation solutions in that context.