Visualizing Complex Semantic Timelines

Historical data items are often semantically inter-related, such as news events that build on past events. Such inter-related data have so far been visualized primarily with simple timeline interfaces, which tend to not scale well, and which do not illustrate important semantic relationships among the data. An improved technique would be useful in news analysis, social and historical research, criminal investigation, etc. We propose a new interface design, called Semantic Timelines. Since such historical information involves commentary on previous data (e.g., a newsmaker comments on something that happened last year), we allow for different time periods to be vertically stacked, so that a period of comment or consequences can sit directly on top of a period of earlier activity. In addition, Semantic Timelines are zoomable, and can include hierarchical nesting structures for drill-down. Together, these techniques allow a vast amount of historical information to be viewed within a rich semantic context, at various scales simultaneously.