TimeSet for Temporal Sets

What are the challenges in timeline visualisation?

Current timeline visualisations do not allow grouping the event by a person or organisation. Instead, this is usually done using colour or symbol, which make it difficult to follow a person or organisation.

TimeSets

Grouping events by person or organisation, while keep their temporal order. This makes it easier to:

  • Follow a person, organisation, or any other entity type (such as location),
  • See the interaction of multiple sets,
  • And many other things ...

Online Demo

You can explore the CIA Leak case with the TimeSet here.

Paper

P. H. Nguyen, K. Xu, R. Walker, and B. L. William Wong, TimeSets: Timeline Visualization with Set Relations, Information Visualization, 2015. PDF

Background and features

Updated set colouring (no voice over)

TimeSets for Uncertainty Visualisation

Online Demo

You can explore the US 2016 Election Facebook Fake News dataset with the TimeSet Uncertainty here.

Paper

Saminu Salisu, Kai Xu, Adrian Wagstaff, Mike Biggs and Graham Phillips TimeSets for Uncertainty Visualisation, EG UK Computer Graphics & Visual Computing, 2016. PDF

Load your own data with Google Spreadsheet

The TimeSet Uncertainty allows loading of user data through Google Spread Sheet so long as they follow the simple data format.

Data Format

For TimeSets Uncertainty to work with your Google Spread Sheet, it must have two sheets: one named data and the other named themes. The first row of the data sheet must contains the column name, exactly as describe below:

Compulsory columns (without these TimeSets Uncertainty won't work):
  • title: the event title shown in TimeSets; usually should be very short;
  • time: an event can be either an time-point or interval event. If there is only one date value, the event will be treated as a time-point event. If there are two values, it will be an interval event: the first date will be the starting point and the second date will be the end point;
Optional columns (TimeSets will recognise these fields, but also work without them):
  • details: the detailed description of an event;
  • uncertainty: numeric value of the uncertainty level of an event;
  • source: this will be displayed with the details and used to calculate the source uncertainty by averaging all the uncertainty value of all the events from one source;
  • influence: this can be the amount of likes, comments, shares, or other similar metrics;
  • image: the URL to the associated image.

The themes sheet should only have one column theme with the list of entities that populate the entity list in TimeSets.

Template

This is an example that you can use to create your own spreadsheet. It has all the compulsory and optional columns with some example rows.

Load Data into TimeSets Uncertainty

Once the data is formatted as described above in the Google Spreadsheet, it can be added to TimeSets Uncertainty using following steps:

  1. Export the Spreadsheet by clicking file -> publish to web -> entire documents -> publish;
  2. goto share -> copy link e.g. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/pubhtml
  3. Append the url to the end of http://vis4sense.github.io/timesets/uncert/ with ?url=, e.g. http://vis4sense.github.io/timesets/uncert/?url=https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/pubhtml
  4. Open the URL in the browser and it should show your data in the TimeSets Uncertainty.