A visual digital library approach for time-oriented scientific primary data

Digital Library support for textual and certain types of non-textual documents has significantly advanced over the last years. While Digital Library support implies many aspects along the whole library workflow model, interactive and visual retrieval allowing effective query formulation and result presentation are important functions. Recently, new kinds of non-textual documents which merit Digital Library support, but yet cannot be accommodated by existing Digital Library technology, have come into focus. Scientific primary data, as produced for example, by scientific experimentation, earth observation, or simulation, is such a data type. We report on a concept and first implementation of Digital Library functionality, supporting visual retrieval and exploration in a specific important class of scientific primary data, namely, time-oriented data. The approach is developed in an interdisciplinary effort by experts from the library, natural sciences, and visual analytics communities. In addition to presenting the concept and discussing relevant challenges, we present results from a first implementation of our approach as applied on a real-world scientific primary data set.