The CartoDB Torque Visualisation Library

CartoDB has released the library that was used in the amazing Navy of WWI animated visualisation (Google Maps Mania review).

Torque allows developers to render large, time-series data on a map in the client. The library is available on GitHub and CartoDB users can use the code right away by simply specifying username/tablename and datecolumn.

As well as another example of the Royal Navy visualisation there is a demo of the library in action in an historical map of the opening of US Post Offices.

The USPO Map animates through the opening of post offices in the U.S. between1644 and 1901.