|
Time is an exceptional dimension.We recognize this every day: when we are waiting
for a train, time seems to run at a snail’s pace, but the hours we spend in a bar with
a good friend pass by so quickly. There are times when one can wait endlessly for
something to happen, and there are times when one is overwhelmed by events occurring
in quick succession. Or it can happen that the weather forecast has predicted
a nice and sunny summer day, but our barbecue has to be canceled due to a sudden
heavy thunderstorm. Our perception of the world around us and our understanding
of relations and models that drive our everyday life are profoundly dependent on the
notion of time.
As visualization researchers, we are intrigued by the question of how this important
dimension can be represented visually in order to help people understand the
temporal trends, correlations, and patterns that lie hidden in data. Most data are related
to a temporal context; time is often inherent in the space in which the data have
been collected or in the model with which the data have been generated. Seen from
the data perspective, the importance of time is reflected in established self-contained
research fields around temporal databases or temporal data mining. However, there
is no such sub-field in visualization, although generating expressive visual representations
of time-oriented data is hardly possible without appropriately accounting for
the dimension of time.
When we first met, we had all already collected experience in visualizing time
and time-oriented data, be it from participating in corresponding research projects or
from developing visualization techniques and software tools. And the literature had
already included a number of research papers on this topic at that time. Yet despite
our experience and the many papers written, we recognized quite early in our collaboration
that neither we nor the literature spoke a common (scientific) language.
So there was a need for a systematic and structured view of this important aspect of
visualization. |
