ChronoView: Visualization Technique for Many Temporal Data

Abstract

This paper presents a method of visualizing data that contains temporal information, such as a human's behavior and the time at which it occurs. A feature of the data is that each event may have one or more time-stamps. By analyzing this kind of data, we are able to find some behavioral patterns and obtain knowledge applicable to many fields, such as marketing research and security. We develop 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, similar to the dial of an analog clock. 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, which is enriched with additional functions and overcomes the drawbacks of the original system. A use case involving tweet data from Twitter illustrates the use and practicality of ChronoView.