Metadata
Title
TimeTree: Exploring Time Changing Hierarchies
Category
general
UUID
fcd0ddf7a3e74015ac48b4940ea3227b
Source URL
https://idl.uw.edu/papers/timetree
Parent URL
https://idl.uw.edu/papers
Crawl Time
2026-03-11T03:07:41+00:00
Rendered Raw Markdown 
# TimeTree: Exploring Time Changing Hierarchies

**Source**: https://idl.uw.edu/papers/timetree
**Parent**: https://idl.uw.edu/papers

[Stuart K. Card](http://www2.parc.com/istl/groups/uir/people/stuart/stuart.htm), Bongwon Suh, Bryan Pendleton, [Jeffrey Heer](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jheer/), John W. Bodnar.
Proc. IEEE Visual Analytics Science & Technology (VAST), 2006

[Stuart K. Card](http://www2.parc.com/istl/groups/uir/people/stuart/stuart.htm), Bongwon Suh, Bryan Pendleton, [Jeffrey Heer](http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~jheer/), John W. Bodnar

Proc. IEEE Visual Analytics Science & Technology (VAST), 2006

 

A TimeTree visualization of a dynamic organization chart. Nodes colored in red are those being actively tracked over time. The TimeSlider in the bottom panel allows navigation to a particular time point and provides a visualization of career events.

Materials

[PDF](https://idl.cs.washington.edu/files/2006-TimeTree-VAST.pdf)

Abstract

Intelligence analysis often involves the task of gathering information about an organization. Knowledge about individuals in an organization and their relationships, often represented as a hierarchical organization chart, is crucial for understanding the organization. However, it is difficult for intelligence analysts to follow all individuals in an organization. Existing hierarchy visualizations have largely focused on the visualization of fixed structures and can not effectively depict the evolution of a hierarchy over time. We introduce TimeTree, a novel visualization tool designed to enable exploration of a changing hierarchy. TimeTree enables analysts to navigate the history of an organization, identify events associated with a specific entity (visualized on a TimeSlider), and explore an aggregate view of an individual's career path (a CareerTree). We demonstrate the utility of TimeTree by investigating a set of scenarios developed by an expert intelligence analyst. The scenarios are evaluated using a real dataset composed of eighteen thousand career events from more than eight thousand individuals. Insights gained from this analysis are presented.

BibTeX

```
@inproceedings{2006-timetree,
  title = {TimeTree: Exploring Time Changing Hierarchies},
  author = {Card, Stuart AND Suh, Bongwon AND Pendleton, Bryan AND Heer, Jeffrey AND Bodnar, John},
  booktitle = {Proc. IEEE Visual Analytics Science \& Technology (VAST)},
  year = {2006},
  pages = {3--10},
  url = {https://idl.uw.edu/papers/timetree},
  doi = {10.1109/VAST.2006.261450}
}
```

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