Visualizing Temporal Data using prefuse

 midgaard
Team  Peter Weishapl,Vienna University of Technology, Institute of Software Technology and Interactive System, Vienna, Austria
Wolfgang Aigner, Vienna University of Technology, Institute of Software Technology and Interactive System, Vienna, Austria
 
Contact Person  Peter Weishapl
 
Project  The aim of this project was to extend and generalize PlanViewer, a Software Prototype applying PlanningLines to MS-Project and Asbru plans. As PlanViewer has been generalized to not only visualize plans, but any kind of temporal information, and to emphasise the difference between the old PlanViewer and the new, extended version, the new prototype is called TimeViewer. As a byproduct of TimeViewer an API called TimeVis has been developed. TimeVis enables developers to quickly develop applications that need to display any kind of temporal information. Both, TimeVis and TimeViewer have been developed using Java Swing, Java 2D and prefuse.

Particularly the requirements were:
  • Provide an Overview Plus Detail interface, whereas the overview provides a Range Slider control to navigate (pan and zoom) on the detail view.
  • Provide a Fisheye View for the temporal axis and enable the user to adjust the fisheye intensity and eventually to turn the fisheye on and off.
  • Make it possible to visualize multiple plans beneath each other.
  • The interaction and navigation, especially the toolbar, needs to be im- proved in order to enhance usability.
  • It should be possible to search for activities.
  • Extract a (TimeVis) API from the TimeViewer prototype to make it easy for developers to build applications with Java Swing and prefuse to visualize any kind of temporal information.
 
Downloads 
download
 >> Download TimeViewer prototype executeable jar
Filename: TimeViewer.zip
Needed application: Java JRE 5
 Size: 2 MB

download
 >> Download Documentation of TimeVis
Filename: TimeVis.pdf
Needed application: PDF Viewer
 Size: 552 kB

Images  To retrieve an enlarged version of the images, click on them:
 


TimeViewer application window showing a sample plan

TimeViewer application window showing a sample plan
 		 Different views in TimeView

Sample timescale created with TimeVis
 
Related Work  W. Aigner: Interactive Visualization of Time-Oriented Treatment Plans and Patient Data; Master's thesis, Supervisor: S. Miksch; Institut für Softwaretechnik und Interaktive Systeme, 2003.

A. Fellner: Treating Temporal Uncertainties in Complex Hierarchical Data; Master's Thesis, Supervisor: S. Miksch and W.Aigner; Institut für Softwaretechnik und Interaktive Systeme, 2006.