Temporal data

Temporal data refers to data, where changes over time or temporal aspects play a central role or are of interest.

Definitions

A temporal data denotes the evolution of an object characteristic over a period of time.

[Daassi and Nigay, 2004]

Time dependent data is characterized by data elements being a function of time. In general, data takes the form

d = f(t)

For data defined at discrete time stamps t_i, this relation can be represented as:

D = {(t₁, d₁),( t₂, d₂), ..., (t_n, d_n)}

where

d_i = f(t_i)

[Müller and Schumann, 2003]

Time-series are a part of the broader field of time-oriented data:

Time series data is characterized by data elements being a function of time. In general, this data takes the following form:

D = {(t₁, y₁),( t₂, y₂), ..., (t_n, y_n)}

with

y_i = f(t_i)

[Weber et al., 2001]

Remarks

Applying exploratory (esp. timelines) as well as confirmatory methods, temporal data can be used to analyze the influence of time on a certain variable.

Synonyms

• temporal data
• time-oriented data
• time-varying data
• time-dependent data

References

• [Daassi et al., 2004] Chaouki Daassi, Laurence Nigay, and Marie-Christine Fauvet. Visualization Process of Temporal Data, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3180, Springer-Verlag Heidelberg, 2004.
• [Jensen and Snodgrass, 1999] Christian S. Jensen and Richard T. Snodgrass. Temporal Data Management, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 11:36-44, 1999.
• [Müller and Schumann, 2003] W. Müller and H. S. Schumann. Visualization Methods for Time-dependent Data - an Overview, In Proceedings of Winter Simulation 2003, New Orleans, USA, 2003
• [Weber et al., 2001] Marc Weber, Marc Alexa, and Wolfgang Müller. Visualizing Time-Series on Spirals, In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization 2001 (InfoVis 2001), p. 7-14, October 2001.