Open source tools for creating and publishing animated web maps?

If you can put your data into JSON, KML, or GeoRSS then timemap handles time in a very elegant way.

UPDATE: Other options to consider:

• StatPlanet
• Geopublisher

Its not open source, but the free Google Earth API provides an interface and storage mechanism for time series data, see the API's Time documentation.

Sticking with OpenLayers, it does support WMS-T (see example), which could be used in conjunction with something like this patch to provide an interface for controlling the animation.