Plant Evolution Timeline

Project Aims

The Plant Evolution Timelime: Visualisation of Complex Data from Many Sources

As well as exploring the potential of semantic tools to support the development of scientific visualisations, this project aimed to produce an ‘integrative’ learning environment to support students in their learning about the complex subject of plant evolution.

Teaching and Learning Issues

The development of sophisticated plant-life came about through the interplay of many factors. Understanding the overall process involves interpreting the interactions between biological and physical variables over 550 million years of the Earth’s history. The topic thus requires its component parts to be combined by contextualising within the whole, but a student can only do this having been taught its entirety. The quantity of data and the need to understand complex interactions between seemingly disparate variables over a vast timescale pose signiﬁcant obstacles for the teaching and learning of plant evolution.

The Development Process

This project aimed to counter these problems by focusing on the temporal data handling capabilities of the SIMILE toolkit, resulting in the Plant Evolution Timeline which acts as a interactive portal to a collection of large datasets. The data was extracted from journal articles and formatted within text ﬁles that can be read by the timeplot exhibit tool. This tool visually presents the data in a variety of formats. The temporal resolution can be altered dynamically and the data displayed can be customised, highlighting particular variables and concepts. This facilitates the learning of each key component within the context of the whole, by providing a rich context for each learning objective or conceptual challenge.