OGLE Event Timeline

[Rob Seaman]

Alasdair Allan wrote:

> I've been experimenting with various ways to display event data [...]
>
>   http://vo.astro.ex.ac.uk/ogle/cgi-bin/timeline.cgi

Cool!

> although be warned, the page is fairly javascript heavy so might  
> take a while to load the first time round.

Users never (never, ever) heed or appreciate warnings.  For an object  
lesson about this, it's monsoon season in Tucson.  A sport for the  
local newscasters is to catch helicopter video of citizens speeding  
around traffic barriers and drowning their engines in the rushing  
washes.

Suspect the responsiveness issues will continue to drive you to a  
different implementation.

> At the top of the page is an event timeline, there are two  
> independently scrollable bars (the upper in days, the lower in  
> months), you can click and drag the timeline to show previous  
> events. The view of the top scrollable area is represented by a  
> light grey box on the bottom (month view) area.

I originally expected to be able to drag the light grey box against  
the background.  It makes sense once you get the knack, but some  
folks will lose their patience.  You should seek feedback from  
unfamiliar users (that is, from users unfamiliar with astronomical  
events :-) to polish the look and feel interactions.

> Each event is represented by a marker, and clicking on the marker  
> will bring up additional data and links

Very cool.  How about some user controls to allow turning the labels  
on and off, for instance?  A more general comment is that we need to  
consider how best to standardize the display of the text of a VOEvent  
packet.  It gets kind of lame having to click 'view source' for every  
packet from the various feeds.  On the other hand, we don't want to  
tailor the packets purely for display by escaping all the angle  
brackets and what have you.  Perhaps view-source is javascriptable?

> The OGLE event data is also displayed normally in table form below  
> the timeline interface.

Not sure that the table form is indeed the "normal" form.  The  
ultimate organizing principle of our events is the passage of time on  
the celestial sphere.  I'm very pleased to see that we're starting to  
wrestle with these  epistemological questions :-)

Rob
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