Visualizing Timelines

Timelines, (as opposed to timeseries) are a sequence of events each represented as a point in time, or a ranges of times with various levels of accuracy.

For example iso8601 with millisecond precision and timezones

relative timestamps

There is a sense in which timeline data is biased, in that "1957 - book published" is a point in time date, for some event which is actually the culmination of many years of research. Also that the ideas might no be adopted for many years after the publication, or indeed after the death of the author

In mediawiki
Get a basic timeline representations using EastTimeline extension http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EasyTimeline/syntax

WikiTimeLine
http://www.chaosreligion.com/wiki/WikiTimeLine

Horizontal timeline
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Horizontal_timeline/doc

iso 8601
http://web.archive.org/web/20110212152602/http://web.mac.com/skipgeel/iso8601.html

external examples
http://www.dipity.com/