Continuous time in arbitrary units?

[niemasd]

First of all, thank you for this awesome tool! I'm the developer of an epidemic simulation tool (FAVITES), and I've been struggling to find good ways of visualizing the contact and transmission networks that get simulated by my tool, and Cosmograph is amazing!

In the "How to Visualize a Graph with a Million Nodes" article, the "Cosmograph and how it works" section mentions that graphs can include temporal information for the edges via the following CSV format:

time, source, target, value
2/4/2022, node1, node2, 2
2/5/2022, node1, node3, 10
…

The transmission networks that I simulate have continuous time rather than discrete time in days, and the times start at 0 and go forward in some arbitrary unit, e.g. the following:

time,source,target
0.001124,4,83
0.00119,5,69
0.002333,3,16
...

However, when I load the network into Cosmograph, it isn't able to parse the timeline data. Would it be feasible to add support for arbitrary time units, with the timeline automatically going from the earliest time to the latest time?

[rokotyan]

Hi @niemasd, thanks for sharing your feedback with us!

I'm happy to hear that you found Cosmograph useful for visualizing your network data. Currently Cosmograph can only parse dates from the time column but I agree that your use case is perfectly valid ,and having a feature like that will be useful.

I'll add to our to do list and let you know when it's ready (can't promise it'll be soon though because we're currently focusing on a few other features).

[rokotyan]

@niemasd We're working on an update that will support decimal time units. Will it be possible for you to share some of your data sets so we could better test it? You can also try the new version at https://cosmograph.app/numeric-timeline.

[niemasd]

Wow, awesome! Here's an example file:

transmissions.csv

It now seems to parse the timeline data correctly (the timeline bar has ticks at the seemingly correct times), but when I actually try to play the timeline, I don't see anything change in the visualization

[rokotyan]

@niemasd Thanks! We've found the problem, I'll let you know when it's fixed.

[niemasd]

Awesome, thanks so much!! Very exciting stuff 😄

[kolmakova]

Hi @niemasd! I've updated the version at https://cosmograph.app/numeric-timeline, can you check please if everything works OK now?

[niemasd]

Just tried it, and it looks great!

I was only able to figure out how to select a small slice of the timeline and then "play" that slice (so edges pop in when the slice goes over them, but then they pop out when the slice passes them). Is there any way to have "play" functionality where the start time remains at 0 (or whatever start time the user selects) and then have just the end time of the slice "play" forward, so that edges pop in but never pop out? For studying the spread of an epidemic over a transmission network, this type of visualization might be more intuitive to users

[rokotyan]

@niemasd Unfortunately there's no such mode as of now. We'll check how difficult it is to implement, and if not, we'll plan to add it.