TimeFlows: Visualizing Process Chronologies from Vast Collections of Heterogeneous Information Objects

TL;DR

TimeFlows is a visualization method that captures complex, heterogeneous relationships in process chronologies, enhancing understanding of intricate historical events beyond traditional timelines.

Contribution

This work introduces TimeFlows, a novel visualization approach that represents diverse relations among events in process chronologies, based on expert insights and applied to real-world case studies.

Findings

Enhanced visualization of complex event relationships.

Application to the Childcare Benefits Scandal case.

Extension of process discovery to unstructured information objects.

Abstract

In many fact-finding investigations, notably parliamentary inquiries, process chronologies are created to reconstruct how a controversial policy or decision came into existence. Current approaches, like timelines, lack the expressiveness to represent the variety of relations in which historic events may link to the overall chronology. This obfuscates the nature of the interdependence among the events, and the texts from which they are distilled. Based on explorative interviews with expert analysts, we propose an extended, rich set of relationships. We describe how these can be visualized as TimeFlows. We provide an example of such a visualization by illustrating the Childcare Benefits Scandal -- an affair that deeply affected Dutch politics in recent years. This work extends the scope of existing process discovery research into the direction of unveiling non-repetitive processes from unstructured information objects.