CHRONOVIEW: VISUALIZATION TECHNIQUE FOR LARGE AMOUNTS OF TEMPORAL DATA - Information Visualisation: Techniques, Usability and Evaluation - page 67

C HAPTER F OUR
C HRONO V IEW :
V ISUALIZATION T ECHNIQUE FOR L ARGE
A MOUNTS OF T EMPORAL D ATA
S ATOKO S HIROI , K AZUO M ISUE
AND J IRO T ANAKA
Abstract
This chapter presents a method of visualizing data that contains temporal
information. Various types of such data exist: for instance, data referring to
the access of a web page and the time at which it occurs. In this example,
we call the accessing of the web page by a web visitor an event. A feature
of the data is that each event may have one or more time-stamps. For
example, if a web page is accessed at 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., the event has
two time-stamps. By analysing this kind of data, we are able to find some
behavioural patterns and obtain knowledge applicable to many fields, such
as market research and security. We have developed ChronoView, a
visualization technique to support the analysis of data with temporal
information. ChronoView represents an event with a set of time-stamps as
a position inside a circle. By representing each event as a position on a
two-dimensional plane, we can simultaneously visualize many events and
easily compare their occurrence patterns. We implement a tool based on
ChronoView that is enriched with additional functions. Our case study
involving tweet data from Twitter illustrates the use and practicality of
ChronoView.
Introduction
We describe the visualization of large amounts of data that contain
temporal information. The data consist of pairs describing an event and its