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Sponsor Information
Cole Mitchell
Philosophy Instructor
Philosophy Department, NAU
cole.mitchell@nau.edu

Technical Advisor
Dr. Wolf-Dieter Otte
Teaching Website

Overall Problem
The team sponsor, Cole Mitchell, a philosophy professor at NAU came to the Computer Science department to convey the need for a functional, web-based timeline software. Frustrated with the lacking capability of similar timeline software packages, Professor Mitchell asked the chronoView capstone team to deliver a better solution. The goal of this project is to produce a web-based timeline creation and viewing software, capable of displaying interactive timelines containing historical figures lifetimes, events and more.

Timelines are used for many things from business, designing reports to display a schedule of an item in development, to education and showing important invents in history. While business has had various software system designed with their specific goals in mind; education has not received the same level of professional software either being the business timeline software just repackaged towards education or under-designed simplified timeline that does not meet the needs for the education area. This has left instructors and students alike in a situation of using subpar software, or painstakingly creating a timeline from image editing software to get a decent amount of a detail necessary to show visually a set of events. History unlike business uses timelines more fluidly, adding more events as they happen or become discovered where it would be easier to just modify an already created timeline or event. Business only needs simple timelines that can either be recreated fairly easy or do not out live a presentation. There is also the educational community that can profit from this and not just one person or department, the ability for anyone to be able to visit the chronoView's website to upload timeline events and build timelines then share and edit those timelines with anyone they want. The software has the potential to grow the informational database and users for timelines across many educational institutions, from universities all the way down to elementary education.

Project Benefits
By developing a web application that can store events in a centralized database, create then save timelines based on those events, all at the same time creating a user friendly web interface to create, edit and share timelines and events with others. This will facilitate and create a community based solely on historical data and a well organized way of displaying that data to teach others about our past.

This Historical Timeline Module will not only save our sponsor money on buying software that will not meet his needs only because he would be forced into it using it because there is nothing else out there to use, but save him time in painstakingly creating timelines in other software that would not only require more modification to get close to what he wants but also having to reenter or recreate something he or someone else has possibly already done. This could also provide an easy source for others educational or otherwise to create and modify timelines or just reuse already created timelines or events without having to buy an expensive program or populate their own list of events that someone else has already went through the trouble of creating these events or timelines, all within a user friendly environment.