TimeBench, a flexible, easy-to-use, and reusable software library written in Java that provides foundational data structures and algorithms for time- oriented data in Visual Analytics. Thus, it eases the development and testing of new visualization, interaction, and analysis methods. It facilitates the reuse and combination of such methods and fosters their reproducibility and comparability.
TimeBench is licensed under the terms of a BSD 2-clause license, and can be freely used for both commercial and non-commercial purposes (see LICENSE).
The source of several demo applications showing the library in use is included
in the demo/ directory.
The demos are also available via Java Web Start at (http://www.cvast.tuwien.ac.at/TimeBench).
The library distribution uses the following organization:
+ TimeBench |-- data Data files used by the demo applications |-- demo Demo applications showing the library in use |-- src The source code for the TimeBench library
TimeBench is written in Java 1.6. To compile the TimeBench code, and to build and run Visual Analytics prototypes, you'll need a copy of the Java Development Kit (JDK) for version 1.6 or greater.
The library depends on the following packages:
- prefuse, with some extensions
- Apache Commons Lang 3 classes
- Apache log4j 1.2
- iCal4j 1.0.4
- Java/R Interface (JRI), which is part of rJava
- ieg-util, general Java utilities
- ieg-prefuse, general prefuse extensions
We also recommended (though by no means is it required) that you use an Integrated Development Environment such as Eclipse (http://eclipse.org). Especially if you are a Java novice, it will likely make your life much easier.
Rind, A.; Lammarsch, T.; Aigner, W.; Alsallakh, B. & Miksch, S.: TimeBench: A Data Model and Software Library for Visual Analytics of Time-Oriented Data, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, Special Issue "VIS 2013", Vol. 19, No. 12, forthcoming, 2013.