I have a spreadsheet with columns for person, date, event, place name, latitude, and longitude. This is the result of many years of genealogical research that shows the birth, marriage, and death locations for several hundred of my direct ancestors as they migrated across the world and finally converged in South Africa for the last few generations.
I'd very much like to create an animation or video showing their movements over time, preferably with a marker flashing at the location, then fading away, with or without lines linking the markers for the duration of the person's life. At 9 generations ago this would then show 512 births happening at roughly the same time, moving on to them converging into 256 places as couples got married, then between those 256 marriages and the original 512 deaths, the 256 births of people of the next generation would flash on, and so on, finally converging on just my birth. I believe such an animation would be an excellent way to make the vast family tree accessible in a visual way, and other genealogical researchers would probably also enjoy doing this. The ability to automatically zoom in on the bounding box of the locations at any given time would be needed to show movements within a smaller geographic location, but first and foremost I simply want to plot points over time.
Does anyone know of a free or commercial tool that would allow doing this? I have explored this in most genealogical software solutions but they provide very limited tools showing one person or one couple at a time, so I suspect I'm going to have to plug this into a generic 'plot movement over time' tool in a good map service.
I have used GraphXR for plotting family tree members linked to one of their several maps, with the edges being either a birth, marriage or death date. The data is queried from Neo4j which has a seamless interface with GraphXR.
I'm now working on a Neo4j PlugIn for genealogy and collaborating with GraphXR developers to make such visualizations easier for end users.
It's not exactly what you are looking for, but it may be helpful?
http://gfg.md/blogpost/7