Chronos: A tool for interactive scheduling and visualisation of task hierarchies

Saturnino Luz*, Masood Masoodian, Daniel McKenzie, Wim Vanden Broeck

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articleScientificpeer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Visualisation and structuring of tasks in a schedule, from relatively simple activities such as meeting scheduling to more complex ones such as project planning, has been traditionally supported by timeline representations similar to Gantt charts. Despite their popularity, Gantt charts suffer from a number of shortcomings, including poor representation of detail and inefficient use of screen real-estate, particularly when a large number of parallel tasks, each of which requiring its own representation space, need to be displayed. We have devised an alternative visualisation, called temporal mosaic, which addresses some of these shortcomings while utilising space more efficiently. We have recently shown that as a static visualisation temporal mosaics outperform Gantt charts in terms of their ability to convey time-based scheduling information to users engaged in various temporal inference tasks. This paper extends that research by presenting interactive techniques which support creation, and dynamic visualisation of task hierarchies and relationships. These techniques are illustrated through a system for direct manipulation of schedules in both Gantt chart and temporal mosaic formats.

Original languageEnglish
Article number5190780
Pages (from-to)241-246
Number of pages6
JournalProceedings of the International Conference on Information Visualisation
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2009
MoE publication typeA4 Conference publication
EventInternational Conference on Information Visualisation - Barcelona, Spain
Duration: 15 Jul 200917 Jul 2009
Conference number: 13

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