Making sense of time: timeline visualization for public transport schedule

Abstract

The numerical values of time expressed through 24 hours cycle of a day hardly enables to grasp the real sense of time. The perception of day and night requires some extra cognitive effort in general and in travel option in particular. The study focuses on a practical scenario of choosing a public transport system where a set of time and its durations are presented in conventional time format. Travel options are presented in alpha-numeric form where a person may overlook valuable aspects of time associated with journey and often may lead to various degree of discomfort like arriving at the mid-night or long agonizing waiting in transits. Considering the departure time, arrival time, number of transits and their lengths, and the overall length of journey as key ingredients for choosing the right travel option, we find that most people do compromise in some way while a better option is overlooked. In this paper, we have addressed the travel ingredients in the frame of a day for person to pick a better option. Our solution offers a timeline-based graphical visualization of temporal data providing the sense of time in its spatiotemporal sphere. We developed timeline-based visualization, in comparison with the existing textual visualization shows a substantial improvement in making the right choice for a travel, what we call “making sense of time.”