Scalable timeline visualization

摘要

Visualization of the timelines is commonly used in many different areas, such as historical education, medical systems, criminal investigations or social networks. In order to understand presented data, it is desirable to display not only the information itself, but also the relations between visualized entities and other, more detailed information, that will simplify orientation in the created timeline. As many of such information can be obtained from automatic sources, the amount of displayed data can be quite large and it is necessary to find a ways how to facilitate the navigation in the visualized data set. We present a method based on the PageRank evaluation of importance of each visualized entity, along with the tagging that allow user to specify which topics are interested to him. We describe the way how the weight of each entity is calculated and how is the whole visualization created. Along with this, we also present a small user study that we performed to validate our approach.