Interacting with semantics and time

Abstract

Time appears in many different semantic information systems like historical databases, multimedia systems or social communities as a common attribute. Beside the temporal information, the resources in these domains are categorized in a domain-specific schema and interconnected by semantic relations. Nevertheless, the high potential of these systems is not yet exhausted completely. Even today most of these knowledge systems present time-dependent semantic knowledge in textual form, what makes it difficult for the average user to understand temporal structures and dependencies. For bridging this gap between human and computer and for simplifying the exploration of time-dependent semantic knowledge, we developed a new interactive timeline visualization called SemaTime. The new designed temporal navigation concept offers an intuitive way for exploring and filtering time-depended resources. Additionally SemaTime offers navigation and visual filtering methods on the conceptual layer of the domain and is able to depict semantic relations. In this paper we describe the conceptual design of SemaTime and illustrate its application potentials in semantic search environments. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.