Visualisation of parallel data streams with temporal mosaics

Despite its popularity and widespread use, timeline vi-sualisation suffers from shortcomings which limit its use for displaying multiple data streams when the number of streams increases to more than a handful. This paper presents the Temporal Mosaic technique for visualisation of parallel time-based streams which addresses some of these shortcomings. Temporal mosaics provide a compact way of representing parallel streams of events by allocating a fixed drawing area to time intervals and partitioning that area according to the number of concurrent events. A user study is presented which compares this technique to a stan-dard timeline representation technique in which events are depicted as horizontal bars and multiple streams are drawn in parallel along a vertical axis. Results of this user study show that users of the temporal mosaic visualisation per-form significantly better at detecting concurrency, interval overlaps and inactivity than users of standard timelines. 1