Widespread interest in discovering features and trends in time- series has generated a need for tools that support interactive exploration. TimeSearcher is an environment for interactive querying and exploration of time-series data. Queries are built using timeboxes: a powerful graphical, direct-manipulation metaphor for the specification of queries over time-series datasets. These timeboxes support interactive formulation and modification of queries, thus speeding the process of exploring time-series data sets and guiding data mining. The prototype includes windows for timebox queries, individual time-series, and details-on-demand. Other features include drag-and-drop support for query-by-example and graphical envelopes for displaying the extent of the entire data set and result set from a given query.

 

I worked for a year on TimeSearcher 2.0, migrating the old code from Java to C#, adding scalability and performance improvements to the visualization and the query engine, added the ability to visualize and query multi-dimensional data and developing an overview+detail visualization where users can look at a large time span while defining a window that focuses on the area of interest. The figure above is a visualization of 8 GB of textual values of oil data collected over the span of 2 years, at 500 ms frequency.