Towards a Flexible Visualization Tool for Dealing with Temporal Data

Time plays an important role in our everyday's life. For a lot of observations we make and actions we perform, temporal information is relevant. The importance of time is reflected in the development of information systems such as (temporal) database systems and data warehouse systems, which have facilities to cope with temporal data and usually manage huge collections of historical data. It is a challenge to develop intuitive user interaction tools that allow users to fully explore these collections of temporal data. With this paper, we want to contribute to the development of such a tool. The presented approach is based on a visualization of time intervals as points in a two-dimensional space and on temporal reasoning based on this visualization. Flexibility is provided by allowing to cope with imperfections in both the modelling of time and the temporal reasoning.