Making an timeline as an interactive webpage

It is often desirable to share the timeline visualization and research front summary information with other interested parties. Most importantly, a tool is needed to allow subject matter experts (SME's) to interactively explore the timeline, for the purpose of labeling the timeline and extracting information for review, technology forecasting, and monitoring. DIVA has a function for generating webpage based interactive timelines for this purpose. DIVA can also generate webpage versions of many other types of maps, but the timeline is the only type that has interactive links for viewing summary information about the research fronts.

• To produce webpages, it is first necessary to make a folder to contain the webpages, and to set DIVA's project.web to this directory.
  • To create a subfolder of the current MATLAB folder (should be the project folder) and set the project.web to this folder, execute the following two commands in the MATLAB command window.
    • >dos('md web')
    • >project.web=[cd 'web']

• To set the web folder to some pre-existing folder, simply type into the MATLAB command line:
  • >project.web='path'
    • where path is the full path name of the web folder.

To generate the timeline webpage, on the timeline figure execute webpage > make webpage. The webpage program will execute.

To see the webpage open the web folder and open tline.html in a web browser. The web page features the timeline with three sets of clicable links added:

1. Research front summary links Each research front has six links for accessing summary data about the research front.
2. Most cited paper links The top 25 most cited papers in the timeline have links for accessing information.
3. List of most cited papers Clickable links to the most cited papers in the timeline.

The research front summary links are shown below:

1. Papers Click on this letter 'P' to get a list of papers in the research front.
2. References Click on this letter 'R' to get a ranked list of the references cited by the papers in the research front.
3. Paper authors Click on this link to get a ranked list of the authors of papers in the research front.
4. Reference authors Click on this links to get a ranked list of cited reference authors from papers in the research front.
5. Paper journals Click on this link to get a ranked list of journals in which the papers in the research front were published.
6. Reference journals Click on this link to get a ranked list of cited reference journals from papers in the research front.

For most cited papers on the timeline, click on the number next to the paper to disply its bibliographic information. If you hold the mouse pointer over the number, the reference information for the paper will appear, as shown below.

Generating web tables

Originally, it was intended for the web server and database for the timeline webpages to be located on the same machine. In this, the links on the web page are call simple asp programs that generate webpages using queries to the database. However, this solution is not possible to remote servers.

An alternate approach is to generate separate web pages for each link on the page.

To make the web tables execute the following command on the MATLAB command line:

• >show_bib_batch

When this routine completes, check the web folder. You'll see a large number of html files the contain the data for the links in the webpage timeline.

• At this time the only tables for the summary information is implemented. The links for getting information on individual top 25 cited papers is not functioning.

The web folder should be uploaded to a web server and links to the timeline should be provided to SME's or interested parties as needed.

An example of an interactive web page timeline, using the mad cow disease project is shown at this link.

A default project page for the mad cow disease web page is shown here, which shows links to the timeline and other maps for the project.