Timeline

Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information. Below is a live example that you can play with. Pan the timeline by dragging it horizontally or using your mouse-wheel. Click on an event icon or tape for details on the event. The arrow keys can also be used to navigate the timeline.

Just like Google Maps, Timeline can be used with zero software installation, server-side or client-side. And like Google Maps, you can populate Timeline with data by pointing it to an XML file (here is the data file for the timeline above). But Timeline is not limited to only that means of loading data; for instance, we have just added JSON support.

Live Examples

• Religion Timelines: recommended to be viewed on a huge monitor, 2000 years of Jewish and Christianity history, all mashed up, scrolling side-by-side.
• Additional examples

Related Projects

• Exhibit: a lightweight structured data publishing framework that is entirely Javascript-based—you can make nice time lines and maps without ever touching a database or even setting up a web server.

Documentation

• Documentation: read and contribute to Timeline's wiki
• Older documentation from version 1 is available here and here
• Source Code on SVN repository

Mailing list / Feedback / Contribute

• Send questions/comments/ideas/discussions/etc. to our Google groups mailing list
• View and add enhancement ideas / bugs / issues in our issue tracker

Licensing

Timeline is open source software and is licensed under the BSD license.

Credits

This software is sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is maintained by the SIMILE project, in particular:

• David François Huynh, dfhuynh at csail.mit.edu