TLViz - A Trend Visualization Tool for Readily Reusable (R-R) Data

TLViz - A Trend Visualization Tool for Readily Reusable (R-R) Data

The TimeLine Visualizer (TLViz) is an easy to use Windows PC tool. TLViz was originally conceived and developed for OpenVMS Engineering by Ian Megarity at Hewlett Packard in 2001. It was part of what became known as the T4 & Friends project (more about T4 in future posts).

Right from the start, TLViz was expressly designed to work directly with readily-reusable computer system trend data stored in CSV (comma separated values) files. The TLViz format for CSV files obeyed the few simple R-R rules outlined in our previous post on readily reusable data.

Since TLViz is a tool intended to dramatically enhance productivity for dealing with trend data through visualization, the best way to understand its capabilities is for you to try it out on some sample trend data yourself.

A working copy of the TLViz software can be downloaded without charge from the HP's T4 & Friends web site. It will take you just a few minutes to install it on your Windows PC.

At the HP T4 & Friends web site you will find additional background material about TLViz and about the T4 project. You might want to check out the T4 FAQ page and take a look at the Technical Journal Article on TimeLine Collaboration that's also available at that site.

In future posts, we will work through some examples showing the highlights of TLViz' capabilities. In the meantime, once you have it up and running on your PC, you can try out TLViz yourself with the following sample readily-reusable CSV trend data file. The source for this data is World Watch State of the World 2002. Many independent factors from many different areas of interest were combined together in a single file with each covering the same 1990 to 2000 time frame. The areas combined together include

• world population
• travel
• nuclear weapons
• population
• agriculture
• armed forces manpower
• fossil fuel use.

In the next post, we will show some possible impressions you might create/discover by playing with this composite readily reusable data file using TLViz by generating a few sample output graphs.

Update: January 2nd, 2006, 4:15 PM - If you would like a copy of the RR file, please send mail to steve.lieman@trendsthatmatter.com and I will forward it to you. We are working out different possible ways to make it easy for you to download such files in the future but they are not quite ready for prime time yet. My apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused you.