Customizable Time-Oriented Visualizations

Most commercial visualization tools support an easy and quick creation of conventional time-oriented visualizations such as line charts, but customization is limited. In contrast, some academic visualization tools and programming languages support the creation of some customizable time-oriented visualizations but it is time consuming and hard. To combine efficiency, the effort required to develop a visualization, and customizability, the ability to tailor a visualization, we developed time-oriented building blocks that address the specifics of time (e.g. linear vs. cyclic or point-based vs. interval-based) and consist of inner customizable parts (e.g. ticks). A combination of the time-oriented and other primitive graphical building blocks allowed the creation of several customizable advanced time-oriented visualizations. The appearance and behavior of the blocks are specified using spreadsheet-like formulas. We compared our approach with other popular visualization tools. Evaluation showed that our approach rates well in customizability.