I have a large data set of tuples containing (time of event, latitude, longitude) that I need to visualize. I was hoping to generate a 'movie'-like xy-plot, but was wondering if anyone has a better idea or if there is an easy way to do this in Python?
Thanks in advance for the help, --Leo
I have had reasonable success with Python applications generating SVG with animation features embedded, but this was with a smaller set of elements than what you probably have. For example, if your data is about a seismic event, show a circle that shows up when the event happened and grows in size matching the magnitude of the event. A moving indicator over a timeline is really simple to add.
Kaleidoscope (Opera, others maybe, Safari not) shows lots of pieces moving around and I found inspirational. Lots of other good SVG tutorial content on the site too.
You might want to look at PyQwt. It's a plotting library which works with Qt/PyQt.
Several of the PyQwt examples (in the qt4examples directory) show how to create "moving" / dynamically changing plots -- look at CPUplot.py, MapDemo.py, DataDemo.py.
I'd try rpy. All the power of R, from within python. http://rpy.sourceforge.net/
rpy is awesome.
Check out the CRAN library for animations, http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/animation/index.html
Of course, you have to learn a bit about R to do this, but if you're planning to do this kind of thing routinely in future it will be well worth your while to learn.
Enthought's Chaco is designed for interactive/updating plots. the api and such takes a little while to get use to, but once you're there it's a fantastic framework to work with.
If you are interested in scientific plotting using Python then have a look at Mlab: http://code.enthought.com/projects/mayavi/docs/development/html/mayavi/mlab.html
It allows you to plot 2d / 3d and animate your data and the quality of the charts is really high.
The easiest option is matplotlib. Two particular solutions that might work for you are:
1) You can generate a series of plots, each a snapshot at a given time. These can either be displayed as a dynamic plot in matplotlib, where the axes stay the same and the data moves around; or you can save the series of plots to separate files and later combine them to make a movie (using a separate application). There a number of examples in the official examples for doing these things.
2) A simple scatter plot, where the colors of the circles changes with time might work well for your data. This is super easy. See this, for example, which produces this figure
