From the website:
A pragmatic JSON data format, D3 timeline layout, and functions for representing and computing over complex temporal phenomena. It is under active development by its instigators, Elijah Meeks (emeeks) and Karl Grossner (kgeographer), who welcome forks, comments, suggestions, and reasonably polite brickbats.
Topotime currently permits the representation of:
- Singular, multipart, cyclical, and duration-defined timespans in periods (tSpan in Period). A Period can be any discrete temporal thing, e.g. an historical period, an event, or a lifespan (of a person, group, country).
- The tSpan elements start (s), latest start (ls), earliest end (ee), end (e) can be ISO-8601 (YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY-MM or YYYY), or pointers to other tSpans or their individual elements. For example, >23.s stands for ‘after the start of Period 23 in this collection.’
- Uncertain temporal extents; operators for tSpan elements include: before (<), after (>), about (~), and equals (=).
- Further articulated start and end ranges in sls and eee elements, respectively.
- An estimated timespan when no tSpan is defined
- Relations between events. So far, part-of, and participates-in. Further relations including has-location are in development.
Topotime currently permits the computation of:
- Intersections (overlap) between between a query timespan and a collection of Periods, answering questions like “what periods overlapped with the timespan [-433, -344] (Plato’s lifespan possibilities)?” with an ordered list.
To learn more, check out these and other pages in the Wiki and the Topotime web page
I am currently reading the A Song of Fire and Ice (first volume, A Game of Thrones) and the uncertain temporal extents of Topotime may be useful for modeling some aspects of the narrative.
What will be more difficult to model will be facts known to some parties but not to others, at any point in the narrative.
Unlike graph models where every vertex is connected to every other vertex.
As I type that, I wonder if the edge connecting a vertex (representing a person) to some fact or event (another vertex), could have a property that represents the time in the novel’s narrative when the person in question knows a fact or event?
I need to plot out knowledge of a lineage. If you know the novel you can guess which one. 😉