Navigating Data Over Time: Including the Fourth Dimension in Visualizing Knowledge

Abstract

Data in online archives and services are repositories of human knowledge and facts related to the lives of people. Information is visualized in a spatial domain representation that includes text structures, taxonomies, and images. Often interfaces do not offer appropriate tools to compare and navigate data over time, and the information appears as in a big "now", with no reference to the past and no view of the future. Adding the temporal dimension gives the possibility to see, for example, how places and different uses of artifacts changed in time. With the fourth dimension-time-interfaces becomes a 'time machine', a structure that better can represent and visualize knowledge. In this paper, after having described the concept of the navigation in time of data, we describe the Venice Time Machine, a project that aims to represent the millenarian evolution of Venice in social and urban terms implementing the navigation over time of the documents. Then, we propose and interfaces to navigate time using virtual reality, which is inspired by tools used to study trajectories of atomic particles. Finally we present Europeana, a vast archive online of the European knowledge, and an example of a time machine that uses its Application Program Interface.