Abstract

This paper presents an analysis and empirical evaluation of techniques developed to support focus and context awareness in tasks involving visualization of time lines. It focuses on time lines that display discrete events and their temporal relationships. The most common form of representation for such time lines is the Gantt chart. Although ubiquitous in event visualization and project planning applications, Gantt charts are inherently space-consuming, and suffer from shortcomings in providing focus and context awareness when a large number of tasks and events needs to be displayed. In an attempt to address this problem, we implemented and adapted a number of focus and context awareness techniques for an interactive task scheduling system in combination with the standard Gantt chart and an alternative space-filling mosaic approach to time line visualization. A controlled user trial compared user performance at interpreting representations of hierarchical task scheduling, assessing different methods across various conditions resulting from interactive explorations of the Gantt and the mosaic interfaces. Results suggested a number of possible improvements to these interactive visualization techniques. The implementation of some of these improvements is also presented and discussed.

Highlights

  • Time lines provide a flexible and intuitive form of representation of events over time

  • According to the taxonomy proposed in [1], while events are often represented through multiple numeric variables at different levels of abstraction following a linear structure, perhaps the most common use of time lines is in representing univariate data in the form of time intervals

  • The bifocal technique presents a mixed picture: mosaic users appear to have benefited from it as far as answer time is concerned but Gantt users seem to have been hindered by the technique

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Summary

Introduction

Time lines provide a flexible and intuitive form of representation of events over time. According to the taxonomy proposed in [1], while events are often represented through multiple numeric variables at different levels of abstraction following a linear structure (as in [14, 11], for instance), perhaps the most common use of time lines is in representing univariate data in the form of time intervals. The latter is a form widely used in project planning and scheduling visualizations such as the popular Gantt chart, and its modern interactive variants such as LifeLines [21], PlanningLines[2] etc. Discussions of the shortcomings of each approach are presented, along with a range of improvements we have made to our prototype system in order to overcome these shortcomings

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