Timeline Trees: Visualizing Sequences of Transactions in Information Hierarchies

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The first half of the soccer match between Germany and The Netherlands in the World Cup Championships 1990 played in Italy where the ball contacts are visualized as a Timeline Tree

In this research we ask the question how to represent dynamic transaction data or dynamic directed graphs where the single elements are additionally hierarchically organized. We come up with a visualization that is called Timeline Trees.

The time axis starts at the left hand side and runs to the right hand side of the display producing an intuitive interpretation for Western civilized countries (left to right reading direction). The hierarchy is represented as a traditional node-link tree diagram with the root node oriented to the left. The co-occurences of items or relations can be inspected in the thumbnail view between hierarchy and timeline representation. Color coding is used to visually encode the weights of the relations or the number of items bought or involved in a transaction.

The Timeline Trees can also be used to show time-varying bar charts and allow data explorations on different levels of hierarchical granularity.

The paper was presented at the International Symposium on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI) in Naples (Italy). If you are interested in this research please read our paper or write an email.