Making sense of time: timeline visualization for public transport schedule Khandaker Tabin Hasan, Sheak Rashed Haider Noori¥, Abdus SalamИ and Md. Anwarul Kabir 

American International University –Bangladesh, Dhaka, Bangladesh ¥ИUniversity of Trento, Trento, Italy

{tabin, kabir}@aiub.edu, [email protected], [email protected] ABSTRACT The numerical values of time expressed through 24 hours cycle of a day hardly enables to grasp the real sense of time. The perception of day and night requires some extra cognitive effort in general and in travel option in particular. The study focuses on a practical scenario of choosing a public transport system where a set of time and its durations are presented in conventional time format. Travel options are presented in alpha-numeric form where a person may overlook valuable aspects of time associated with journey and often may lead to various degree of discomfort like arriving at the mid-night or long agonizing waiting in transits. Considering the departure time, arrival time, number of transits and their lengths, and the overall length of journey as key ingredients for choosing the right travel option, we find that most people do compromise in some way while a better option is overlooked. In this paper, we have addressed the travel ingredients in the frame of a day for person to pick a better option. Our solution offers a timeline-based graphical visualization of temporal data providing the sense of time in its spatiotemporal sphere. We developed timeline-based visualization, in comparison with the existing textual visualization shows a substantial improvement in making the right choice for a travel, what we call “making sense of time.”

Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5 [Information Interface and Presentation]: General; H.5.2 [Information Interface and Presentation]: User Interfaces – Interaction styles, Graphical user interfaces (GUI), Prototyping.

General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors.

Keywords Timeline visualization, visual perception of time, textual visualization, travel schedule, public transport.

1. INTRODUCTION In our everyday life, we are frequently encountered to use temporal data for abstracting required information for various purposes. In case of travelling we use Transport Scheduler for making decision which uses temporal data (for instance, time of departure, time of arrival, transit time etc) in various forms. However, making quick and right decision for travelling largely depends on presentation of relevant information those are derived from temporal data. Observations suggest that most of the transport authorities worldwide at present use the travel schedulers those represent temporal data textually. However,

different studies have revealed that timeline visual system is a quicker and efficient way of perceiving temporal data. In this context, the objectives of the present studies are twofold. i. To design and develop a prototype for an improved timeline visualization system for Public Transport Scheduler ii. To compare the performances of timeline visual system and traditional textual representation system from users’ perspective.

2. RATIONALE There is a tendency to lose the sense of time when we travel from one place to another. Fair enough to say that a given time and its length in a day are often realized by its position in the day-light status i.e. in relative time. Lengths are better understood while compared to similar temporal data and represented in graph for comparison. From the Chrono-psychological point of view, our mental action is not instantaneous but requires a finite state of time [8] and its behavior stays tuned to sequential contingencies afforded by its environment [11]. In many ways we seem to perceive time, though we don’t have a genuine sense of time and this gave rise to the question what exactly we call the perception of time [13]. We have taken this cognitive approach of the perception of time in developing our visual travel itinerary by time that can adaptively act with our biological clock and the mental sense of time. Traditional travel search engines [6], [16], [17], [19] typically present search results as a plain textual representation ordered by journey starting time from a journey schedule collection of the transport system for a search query. In the event of search, where the task requires finding the most suitable travel option from a search result, these kind of representations often leads overlooking one or more of the following five ingredients of a journey: Departure time, Arrival time, Number of transits, length of each transit, and the overall length of the journey. If not carefully chosen the these ingredients of travel data , users often may end up with a bad selection. On the other hand presenting temporal information visually helps accomplishing respective tasks significantly more easily and makes a travel commendable with mental preparations in advance. For example, determining the suitable travel option just by looking at the timeline bars that represents the transit and travel time. The presentation of journey length, transit time in a welldefined and self-explanatory timeline is an important step to assimilate. Keeping this in mind, we have decided to design and develop a prototype for more effective timeline visualization system for presenting temporal travel data, which also incorporate the concept of daylight, a crucial issue in travel in our proposed timeline visualization system. Apparently, it has been assumed that timeline visualization of temporal data is more effective compared with textual representation. However, to our knowledge, so far, no empirical

survey has been carried out in measuring the effectiveness of these two modes of representation of temporal data, more specifically travel data. On this background, we have decided to carry out a real time survey involving the travelers with a view to measuring effectiveness of temporal and textual representations.

people compromise in selecting a travel option while a better option could have been found if presented properly. For generating data for performance measurement of the prototypes we have conducted a survey on 21 adult travelers of different ages, sex and nationalities. All of them are frequent travelers who travel relatively long distance (more than 300 km) by train.

3. LITERATURE SURVEY

For our survey purpose we have prepared a questionnaire with a view to measuring user’s satisfaction levels for using our two prototypes. Following are the six core questions that reflected the user’s satisfaction.

There are many visualization techniques proposed in the applications domain like clinical data [20] and personal history [9]. The visualization techniques differ in two fundamental ways, e.g., (1) timeline view and (2) calendar view. Therefore, the navigation is exploited in either way provided by the visualization frame-work. While calendar is extensively used in many applications for accessing temporal information, J. Mackinlay et al [10] proposed a 3D spiral calendar view for temporal data visualization with interactive animations. Time relationships among the schedules of groups are supported through the use of time lattice. A planar spiral technique has been used in [15] for the visualization of periodic patterns of serial data. Alonso et al [5] argue that, in search situations where the task requires browsing and exploration of a search result, the temporal information can help significantly to accomplish respective tasks where the presentation of relevant information along a timeline is an important step to find. A variety of concepts for analyzing and visualizing time-oriented data are presented in literature [14], [12] and [1]. Allen et al [3], [2] suggest that the three main purposes of timelines can be summarized as informing the user directly, showing context, and providing contextual links. Placing search results in a timeline can facilitate the exploration of information, in [2] emphasize using timelines to show context using scoping, limited details with restricted options to provide flexible browsing environment. Our work on public transport schedule added another dimension to its usefulness.

4. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY As we have mentioned earlier that the objectives of the present study are twofold, namely designing and developing an improved visualization prototype for travel data and carrying out a survey between textual and visual representation of data, the research methodology has been followed accordingly. Designing a timeline visualization prototype is one of the obvious choices after being inspired by the work in SIMILE Timeline [15]. For the research purpose following the design we have developed a low fidelity prototype for quick user feedback. After the second pass of evaluation, we have developed full functional two versions of the system – one for traditional textual visualization and another for rich but simple graphical visualization. For making a prototype for traditional textual visualization, we have followed the best found examples e.g., VIA Rail Canada [19] and TrenItalia [17] by taking their best part. The travel data was taken from TrenItalia [17] for a length of time. We have developed the same task package scenario for both the system. The time keeper was embedded in the system to capture the task completion time for each task to evaluate and compare the performance. Four sources and destinations providing a set of options to choose. A scenario-based approach has been considered for designing the visualization prototype of travel data. Given some critical scenarios, we have tried to understand what was important to us while choosing a travel schedule from a list of options. The survey also aims at revealing the fact that how many

1. How much has the visual representation made more sense of time for your journey? 2. How much visually clear is to grasp the different segment of time length (e.g., travel lengths and transits)? 3. How good is the presentation for understanding necessary elements of a schedule, e.g., when you start, when you arrive at each point, and how long you? 4. How much awareness has the system provided that you might have to run from platform to platform or wait an agonizing long time for the next train? 5. How beneficial is the summary view in making a decision for each travel option without seeing the detail view? 6. How denotative it is not to miss/overlook any vital piece of your journey information when you choose from summarized view either in text or timeline? 7. How much has the daylight status on absolute timeline influenced your decision? 8. How much have you felt it necessary to see the travel path on the map? Questions 7 and 8 were added in order to understand if detailed view and map view could have contributed to make a decision in graphical visualization. Finally, we asked the most two important questions, 1) if they found a better travel option after switching from textual to graphical visualization and 2) to provide their overall satisfaction rating.

5. OUR VISUALIZATATION PROTOTYPE Our developed system presents the resulting journey schedule in three different ways, with timeline graphical view, detailed view and in geographic view on map.

Figure 1. Comparative timeline view provided for comparison between options. Mouse over popup in corresponding segment color shows that segment’s details.

5.1 Travel Timeline Time usually represented as a continuum line with an origin and no end [1]. Common sense knowledge suggests that the visual version has the advantage over textual presentation as humans can perceive more quickly, we think that presenting journey temporal information visually could help accomplishing respective tasks significantly fast and easy. Therefore we can present journey

duration as a bar in timeline while we mapped the travel and transit durations using two separate colors. A journey from source to destination can be represented as a single bar where the length of the bar is relative to the total duration of the journey. It could be a one color bar when there is no transit or a combination of two colors where one color represents travel and another for transit duration respectively to make them visually distinguishable. Colors are positioned according to real time space arranged from left to right which also enable user control over the level of detail of any piece of time of interest in the journey. A set of available alternative journeys can be presented as a set of vertical bars. In this way we can enable the users to easily single out a best choice from a collections of alternative journeys presented as timeline bars. Timeline provides two main interactive visualizations of travel time, namely Absolute and Comparative timeline. The absolute timeline provides a handy selection of journey when journey length, changeovers and their position in a day are the concern. On the other hand, the comparative timeline view facilitates comparing the options on the basis of journey length. Both of the visualization provides a detailed view of the selected journey. These visualizations and their elements are a direct result of the design goals established for the system. Furthermore, to give a visual impression of the overall journey direction, straight lines have been drowned on map where journey start-point, transits and end-point are shown with descriptive icons.

panel. Mouse over on each segment of the time bar shows the detail of that segment whereas when a time bar is selected the detail view panel shows the detail of all the segments contained by that time bar with graphical comparison. It also shows the platform number and warning message based on the arrival and departure platform distance and the transit time.

Figure 3. Detailed view of the selected timeline in comparative time segments allows user to compare and examine length of each time segment and other necessary information such as arrival and departure platforms. For example if the arrival platform is 2 and departure platform is 10 where transit duration is 5 minutes or less in that case it would show the message “You may have to run”, in the same way when the transit time is hour or more a message could be “You may take a city trip”. However, this is only to elaborate the idea and depends on transport type, e.g. air travel where terminals and gates are even more serious matters.

5.4 Map View Map view is provided as a compliment to timeline view (Figure 4) to give a visual impression we represent travel path information in a visual form, through a map that visually highlights the entire route of the journey. It shows the source and destination and the stopovers in between. On mouse over, the information in bubble is symmetric to the one in timeline. Figure 2. Absolute timeline view of the system with corresponding day-light status at the bottom.  The absolute timeline view provides a means to compare the journey based on their starting time among the alternative journeys. It (Figure 2) provides an absolute travel timeline where time bar segments are positioned according to real time space horizontally whereas durations are presented as a continuum line. Time bars are ordered by journey starting time vertically.  In comparative timeline, time bars (Figure 1) start from the same vertical position but in comparative length depending on their total journey length. It provides a means to compare the journey based on their journey and transit lengths from other alternative options.

5.2 Daylight Status At the bottom of the absolute timeline view (Figure 2), daylight status is shown across the visible length of time. Since our system took example data for a small geographic area, we ignored the dynamics (e.g., latitude, longitude, altitude and day of the year) that determines exact sun’s position, thus the status of daylight. Meteorological data is publicly available from US Naval Observatory [18] that can be used to dynamically enerate daylight and weather conditions in our visual model.

5.3 Detail View In contrary to timeline view, detail view panel shows the detail information bounded by the selected time bar of the timeline

Figure 4. Map view of the travel path that proved less important for schedule selection.

6. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION During the survey. surprisingly it took the users a little more time to choose the desired option from the graphical visualization than from the textual. Understandably, it took longer time to get acquainted with the new system. To minimize the data volume, we took only the average of each travel option for all four travels. During user satisfaction evaluation, convenience of choosing an option was graded 3.6 out of 5 in averages, while 3.5 for textual visualization, and shows a little improvement. The graph bellow shows a better satisfaction level as the evaluation session progressed. One of the most important factors that determined the novelty of graphical visualization was the less necessity of viewing the information in detail for the graphical one as most of them were well integrated in our single visualization technique. As we stated before, users were more concerned about time and

duration of the travel and had little care about other information detail as it was not well presented in the textual visual scheme. When they were presented with the graphical visualization scheme, user’s attention went into other visual information like transit length, daylight status, and path on the map

8. REFERENCES [1] Aigner, W. 2006. Visualizing time and time-oriented information: challenges and conceptual design. PhD thesis, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria. [2] Allen, R.B. 2005. A Focus-Context Browser for Multiple Timelines. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries, 260-261. Denver. [3] Allen, R.B. 1995. Interactive Timelines as Information systems interfaces. In Symposium on Digital Libraries (August 1995), 175-l80. Japan.

Figure 5. Task completion time comparison between traditional visualization vs. timeline visualization. However, when visited, detailed information pan provided exciting experience for the users. Ignoring other determinants, an agenda or meeting for instance, of making the decision, daylight status played an important role. Users looked into the map out of curiosity to see the travel path, but had little importance in making a choice. As answered to our last two questions, all but one answered that they found a better option after switching from textual to graphical visualization from the same set of data. The users ranked the graphical visualization over its textual counterpart. 3 indicated equal, less than 3 was negative and above 3 was positive. The average grade was 4.81, which is a clear acceptance of the graphical visualization

[4] Alonso, O., Gertz, M., and Baeza-Yates, R. 2007. Search Results Using Timeline visualizations. In SIGIR ’07 Proceedings of the 29th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 908-908. [5] Alonso, O., Gertz, M., and Baeza-Yates, R. 2007. On the value of temporal information in information retrieval. ACM SIGIR Forum, 41(2): 35-41. [6] AMTRAC, http://espanol.amtrak.com/amtrak/enes/24/_www_amtrak_co m/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=Amtrak/HomePage. [7] Avelar, S. and Hurni, L. 2006. On the Design of Schematic Transport Maps. In The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, vol. 41, Issue 3, 217-228. [8] Boring, E.G. 1950. A History of Experimental Psychology. Appleton-Century-Crofts, New York. [9] Catherine, P., Brett, M., Anne, R., Seth, W., and Ben, S. 1996. Lifelines: Visualizing personal histories. In CHI, 221227. [10] Mackinlay, D. J., George, G. R., and Robert, D. 1994. Developing calendar visualizers for the information visualizer. In Proceedings of the 7th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, UIST ’94, 109-118, New York, NY, USA.

Figure 6. User’s overall rating for timeline graphical visualization over the textual one. Question 7 and 8 was put only to measure the significance of other visual options and were not compared with the textual one.

7. CONCLUSION Though the visualization of temporal data using timeline approach is not a new one, the addition of daylight to it has improved timeline visualization significantly. From our research, the overall users’ satisfaction level of using timeline visualization system is much higher than the traditional textual representation system of temporal data. Our solution has been developed for train travel with relatively small geographic area, but has proved its effectiveness in understanding time and other valuable information for a travel schedule, such as the five ingredients we mentioned. The study results show a significant role of temporal data visualization in perceiving time. Though timeline visualization is not a new concept, but its area of applications is ostensibly wide. The day light status provided the real sense of relative time, a crucial factor that is naturally aligned with our chronopsychology. This work can be further extended with giving the sense of environmental context by using weather data.

[11] Michon, J.A. 2001. Making sense of time. European Review, 9, 43-57. [12] Moller, W. and Schumann, H. 2003. Visualization methods for time-dependent data - an overview. In Proceedings of winter simulation conference. New Orleans, USA. [13] Nichols, H. 1891. The psychology of time. American Journal of Psychology, 3, 453-529. [14] Silva, S.F. and Catarci, T. 2000. Visualization of linear timeoriented data: a survey. In Proceedings of international conference on web information systems engineering. Hong Kong, China. [15] Simile Timeline, http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/. [16] Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), http://fahrplan.sbb.ch/bin/query.exe/dn. [17] TRENITALIA, http://trenitalia.it/ [18] US Naval Observatory, http://www.usno.navy.mil/ [19] VIA Rail Canada, http://www.viarail.ca/en [20] Yuval, S. and Cleve, C. 1999. Intelligent visualization and exploration of time-oriented clinical data. In HICSS.

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