Date/Time Representation In Support Of Intelligence Analysis

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, ISS
• Research Engineering

2
Outline

• How timelines help analysts
• Requirements for Timelines
• Lockheed Martins research
• Dachselt Weiland critiques of standard timelines

3
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
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
Aspect 1 Smooth Zooming

• View changes slowly to allow continuity
• Hash marks change with zoom level

6
Aspect 2 Fuzzy Dates and Times

• April 98
• until about September 2000

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Aspect 2 Fuzzy Times (continued)

• lttimex val2006-06-01T2015gt
• 815 tonight
• lt/timexgt
• lttimex2 setYES val2006-05-WXX-4gt
• Thursdays in
• lttimex2 val2006-05gt
• May
• lt/timex2gt
• lt/timex2gt
• lttimex2 valP3SU anchor_dirBEFORE
• anchor_val2006-06-01gt
• the past three summers
• lt/timexgt

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Aspect 3 Abstraction

• Present different levels of detail
• Reflect underlying information

9
Aspect 4 Context Bar

• Shows temporal context
• Thumb for slide, resize
• Lines within bar

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Aspect 5 Stacked Timelines

• Shows patterns over time
• Visually find approximate patterns

• Based on
• Week
• Month
• Year
• User defined

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Problems with traditional timelines

• Dachselt Weiland identified 6 problems with
  traditional timelines
• Views are discrete and fixed, thus they are bound
  to one specific level of detail and have a
  static size.
• High-level views hide too much data, whereas
  detailed views suffer from lack of context and
  orientation.
• Scalability, e.g. for mobile devices is not
  supported.

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Problems (continued)

• Missing support for zooming lenses, i.e.
  high-detail views or focus areas within a coarser
  time view.
• Requirement of additional cognitive efforts for
  reinterpretation and orientation due to missing
  smooth transition between views.
• 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
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
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/ace0
  5/doc/ace05eval_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
  _timex2_standard_v1_3.pdf

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Backup
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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.p
hp
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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
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
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PNNL ThemeRiver
http//www.pnl.gov/infoviz/technologies.htmltheme
river
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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
TimeZoom

• Smooth zooming
• Good focus feature

http//www-mmt.inf.tu-dresden.de/Projekte/Publikat
ionen/details/0604.pdf