Work with Summary View

Displaying too many features at once can overwhelm the view of the timeline and obscure temporal patterns. Imagine trying to discern a thousand features a day over a month. Points that are stacked make it hard to understand what is happening on the timeline. Changing the timeline to Summary View can help regain awareness through visualizing these trends. The Summary View tool allows you to visualize temporal and spatial data on a histogram. You can visualize data and its relationship to time by category. In ArcGIS AllSource, the Summary View tool shows trends in data using timelines, time scales, and other geoprocessing tools.

The Summary View tool allows you to visualizes data in time spans instead of individual events. The Timeline pane displays data on a histogram by grouping multiple events into bins. This difference in visualization allows you to find patterns in the dataset.

To enable Summary View, complete the following steps:

1. Open a map with Timelines enabled.
2. Right-click Timeline in the Contents pane and click Open Timeline.

   The Timeline pane appears and shows the data from the map.

3. On the Timeline contextual tab, in the Summary group, click the Summary View button .

   The Timeline pane changes from a single lane of data into bins along the timeline that assembles data into groups based on time and category.

Use Time Scale

The Time Scale controls the increment of time set on the timeline. To use Time Scale to quickly zoom in or out of a time frame on the timeline, complete the following steps:

1. Open a timeline.
2. On the Timeline contextual tab, in the View group, click the Time Scale drop-down arrow, and choose a time frame to visualize in the Timeline pane.

   The Timeline pane updates to the new timescale.

   Note:

   When setting a Time Scale, consider the start and end points in time of the data. If set too small, the timeline zooms into the data. If set too high, the timeline zooms beyond the data, obscuring temporal patterns.

Use Binning Timespan

To use the Binning Timespan setting to control the amount of information in the timeline by selecting the time span you want visualized in each bar on the timeline, complete the following steps:

1. On the Timeline contextual tab, in the Summary group, click the Binning Timespan drop-down arrow.
2. Choose a time frame to analyze.

The data in the Timeline pane updates to represent the selected Binning Timespan value.

Note:

When working with Time Scale and Binning Timespan consider how the data should be visualized. For instance, when using Summary View to analyze crime data over a period of ten years it can be beneficial to set the Time Scale to Decade and Binning Timespan to Year to assess which year had to the most amount of crime in the decade.

Return to Chronological View

Chronological View shows the data in the lanes as single events occurring in time instead of grouping them using Summary View.

To return to Chronological View, on the Timeline contextual tab, in the Summary group, click the Summary View button to disable Summary View.

Using Summary View and these tools, the Timeline pane is customized from a single lane of data along the timeline into a visualized histogram along the timeline that is ready for analysis.