1. Date/Time Representation In Support Of Intelligence Analysis David M. Cassel Sarah M. Taylor, PhD Gary J. Katz Lois C. Childs Raymond D. Rimey, PhD Lockheed Martin, IS&S Research Engineering

2. August 23 rd, 2006 Outline How timelines help analysts Requirements for Timelines Lockheed Martins research Dachselt & Weiland critiques of standard timelines

3. August 23 rd, 2006 How do timelines help analysis? Timelines provide ordering and temporal context Make it easier to see conflicts: On March 15th (2001 understood from previous context), Mr. Jones left London for Kabul, beginning a trip of several months to countries in South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. Mr. Smith arrived in London in 2000, establishing a close working relationship with Mr. Jones there during the late spring of the following year.

4. August 23 rd, 2006 Timeline Requirements Represent various kinds of time expressions (absolute, relative, fuzzy, set) Reflect ordering and spacing of events Represent different levels of precision Represent reliability of information sources Be able to scale Maintain user orientation during navigation

5. August 23 rd, 2006 Aspect 1: Smooth Zooming View changes slowly to allow continuity Hash marks change with zoom level

6. August 23 rd, 2006 Aspect 2: Fuzzy Dates and Times April 98 until about September 2000

7. August 23 rd, 2006 Aspect 2: Fuzzy Times (continued) 8:15 tonight Thursdays in May <timex2 val=P3SU anchor_dir=BEFORE anchor_val=2006-06-01> the past three summers

8. August 23 rd, 2006 Aspect 3: Abstraction Present different levels of detail Reflect underlying information

9. August 23 rd, 2006 Aspect 4: Context Bar Shows temporal context Thumb for slide, resize Lines within bar

10. August 23 rd, 2006 Aspect 5: Stacked Timelines Shows patterns over time Visually find approximate patterns Based on Week Month Year User defined

11. August 23 rd, 2006 Problems with traditional timelines Dachselt & Weiland identified 6 problems with traditional timelines 1. Views are discrete and fixed, thus they are bound to one specific [level of detail] and have a static size. 2. High-level views hide too much data, whereas detailed views suffer from lack of context and orientation. 3. Scalability, e.g. for mobile devices is not supported.

12. August 23 rd, 2006 Problems (continued) 4. Missing support for zooming lenses, i.e. high- detail views or focus areas within a coarser time view. 5. Requirement of additional cognitive efforts for reinterpretation and orientation due to missing smooth transition between views. 6. Display of absolute time is missing, i.e. scroll- bar based views (e.g. in e-mail applications) only show relative position within the collection.

13. August 23 rd, 2006 Conclusion Timelines are helpful for intelligence analysis But there is room to improve prior tools We have laid out the features we are developing and shown them to address Dachselt & Weilands criteria Thanks for listening! Questions?

14. August 23 rd, 2006 References Dachselt, R.; Weiland, M.: TimeZoom: A Flexible Detail and Context Timeline; Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2006) Extended Abstracts, April 22-27, 2006, Montréal (Québec, Canada), pp. 682-687 Dachselt & Weilands paper ACE2005: http://www.nist.gov/speech/tests/ace/ace05/doc/ace05ev al_official_results_20060110.htm TERN 2004: http://timex2.mitre.org/tern.html Ferro, Lisa. 2004. TIDES: 2003 Standard for the Annotation of Temporal Expressions. http://timex2.mitre.org/annotation_guidelines/2003_time x2_standard_v1_3.pdf

15. August 23 rd, 2006 Backup

16. August 23 rd, 2006 InXight Time Wall Display: Icons, text Lanes for multiple timelines No manipulation of data Overlapping events are visually blocked Points in time only http://www.inxight.com/products/sdks/tw/features.php

17. August 23 rd, 2006 TildenWoods Centrifuge Display: text, colored bars Modes: Absolute duration Relative duration Point in time Can present multiple timelines One layer of depth Must change underlying table http://www.tildenwoods.com/

18. August 23 rd, 2006 Visual Analytics VisuaLinks Display: icons, text Can compare timelines Points only Change database to add/modify material Icons merged for same type/same time http://www.visualanalytics.com/products/visuaLinks/index.cfm

19. August 23 rd, 2006 PNNL ThemeRiver http://www.pnl.gov/infoviz/technologies.html#themeriver

20. August 23 rd, 2006 I2 Analyst Notebook Display: icons, text, links Not specifically a timeline tool Does not show time scale, duration http://www.i2.co.uk/Products/Analysts_Notebook/

21. August 23 rd, 2006 TimeZoom Smooth zooming Good focus feature http://www-mmt.inf.tu-dresden.de/Projekte/Publikationen/details/0604.pdf