TIME°DIFF: A Visual Approach to Compare Period Data

Temporal data, and in particular time periods, are crucial to many applications in different sectors, such as industry, medicine, insurance, finance, tourism, and management. Such applications, often consult historical information in order to compare and optimize processes. Generally, the time periods in this data represent the period of validity in the real-world, such as the period of a specific assignment, but may also represent the periods when the data was stored, i.e., believed to be true. Inferring new information from this data is eased by visualizing and comparing their different time periods. In this paper, we present Time°diff , a novel visualization approach based on timebar charts, which is suitable for comparing data with time periods and enabling decision makers to easily analyze information containing period data.