Pad++: advances in multiscale interfaces
CHI '94 Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Speed-dependent automatic zooming for browsing large documents
UIST '00 Proceedings of the 13th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology
Managing Intervals Efficiently in Object-Relational Databases
VLDB '00 Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
Joining interval data in relational databases
SIGMOD '04 Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Tuning and testing scrolling interfaces that automatically zoom
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The promise of zoomable user interfaces
Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Visual Information Communication
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In this paper, we describe the architecture, infrastructure requirements, and technical evolution of ChronoZoom, a unique infinite-zoom, temporal-data-visualization open-source platform. With ChronoZoom, it is possible to browse through time and history and fill the browser with events that span from 13.8 billion years to a single day. ChronoZoom, originally a tool to teach Big History, offers significant information technology challenges for integrating IT best practices in HCI (browser based zoomable interfaces), Cloud Computing (client-server architectures) and Big data (storage and retrieval) infrastructure technologies. This paper offers an overview of the ChronoZoom platform, outlines the technical issues we encountered, and the corresponding design decisions that enable scaling the server to support rendering millions of timelines for thousands of concurrent, interactive users. This paper is also a testament to how a distributed team of IT developers across two continents successfully collaborated to ship an open-source, online, educational tool that is set to have tremendous impact on how we view and interact with history. In addition to providing a tool to visualize history, ChronoZoom offers a unique data visualization tool that offers an intuitive, graphic interface for temporal display. While this paper focuses on the use of ChronoZoom to display historical information, it is equally well suited to show scientific, personal, or statistical data with its unique ability to permit temporal zoom.