Continuous time in arbitrary units?

[niemasd]

First of all, thank you for this awesome tool! I'm the developer of an epidemic simulation tool (FAVITES), and I've been struggling to find good ways of visualizing the contact and transmission networks that get simulated by my tool, and Cosmograph is amazing!

In the "How to Visualize a Graph with a Million Nodes" article, the "Cosmograph and how it works" section mentions that graphs can include temporal information for the edges via the following CSV format:

time, source, target, value
2/4/2022, node1, node2, 2
2/5/2022, node1, node3, 10
…

The transmission networks that I simulate have continuous time rather than discrete time in days, and the times start at 0 and go forward in some arbitrary unit, e.g. the following:

time,source,target
0.001124,4,83
0.00119,5,69
0.002333,3,16
...

However, when I load the network into Cosmograph, it isn't able to parse the timeline data. Would it be feasible to add support for arbitrary time units, with the timeline automatically going from the earliest time to the latest time?

[rokotyan]

Hi @niemasd, thanks for sharing your feedback with us!

I'm happy to hear that you found Cosmograph useful for visualizing your network data. Currently Cosmograph can only parse dates from the time column but I agree that your use case is perfectly valid ,and having a feature like that will be useful.

I'll add to our to do list and let you know when it's ready (can't promise it'll be soon though because we're currently focusing on a few other features).