Relationship Timelines by Skye Bender-deMoll.
From the post:
I finally had a chance to pull together a bunch of interesting timeline examples–mostly about the U.S. Congress. Although several of these are about networks, the primary features being visualized are changes in group structure and membership over time. Should these be called “alluvial diagrams”, “stream graphs” “Sankey charts”, “phase diagrams”, “cluster timelines”?
From the U.S. Congress to characters in the Lord of the Rings (movie version) and beyond, Skye explores visualization of dynamic relationships over time.
Raises the interesting issue of how do you represent a dynamic relationship in a topic map?
For example, at some point in a topic map of a family, the mother and father did not know each other. At some later point they met, but were not yet married. Still later they were married and later still, had children. Other events in their lives happened before or after those major events.
Scope could segment off a segment of events, but you would have to create a date/time datatype or use one from the W3C, XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes Second Edition, for calculation of which scope precedes or follows another scope.
A closely related problem is to show what facts were known to a person at some point in time. Or as put by Howard Baker:
“What did the President know and when did he know it?” [During the Watergate Hearings
That may again be a relevant question in the not too distant future.
Suggestions for a robust topic map modeling solution would be most welcome!