The History of Temporal Data Visualization and a Proposed Event Centric Timeline Visualization Model

Temporal data management has an ancient history. From the earliest days people are using timeline (a way of displaying a list of events in chronological order) to record their transaction data in a log file or table and often those files or tables are used by researchers to understand the events or trends of the transaction. The first attempt to illustrate chronological events graphically was made in 1765 and presently timeline is used ubiquitously. This paper attempts to explain the history and present state of timeline visualization and proposes a timeline visualization model that provides a new perspective on the existing models. We showed the development of timeline visualization of temporal data over decades, evaluated different techniques, connected and presented them in sequential order to justify the importance of our proposed technique. Our study is structured in three parts: First we discussed different methods of management and visualization of temporal data, then we showed the history and current state of timeline visualization and finally we proposed a timeline visualization technique. 1 General Terms Data Visualization, Timeline.

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