The ECLAP Timeline is based on a set of tools to solve, browse and navigate on the several kind of dates associated with content. In the performing arts context, each single content may have several different dates associated with. For example, the date of the first performance, those of the other performances, the date of upload on ECLAP, the date of production, the date of publication, the last modification date, etc. The ECLAP Timeline provides a set of tools to  resolve, disambiguate, browse and navigate on the several dates associated with content.

Functionalities:

• Zoom in and out in the timeline
• <  >  for shifting time diagram on left and right
• Single click on a bar to see how the population of content is composed in that period. Thus, you can select the date kind you like to see the content visualized below the time line.
• Double click on a bar to Zoom in with respect to the time segment selected.
• below the graph, tick and untick kind of dates at which you are interested with.

Classification of dates:

• First performance: premier and/or first performance of a given production
• performance: date of the performance
• Acceptation: date in which a given content or product has been accepted
• Creation: creation date
• Refreshing: date in which the content and the work have been refreshed
• Issuing: delivering date
• Recording: recording date
• Uploading: date in which the content has been uploaded into ECLAP
• Modifying: last modification date of the content into ECLAP

On ECLAP, we are collecting and ingesting content and metadata from several tens of different content providers, and thus of sources, based on different standards, from different countries. Each of these sources have metadata content coming from different collections, stratified overtime and modalities of writing and performing classification. In most cases dates are reported in different formats, languages, for example: 2013-04-01, April 2013, travanj 2013, 4th of May 1996, 4 mai 1996, etc. In other cases the provided dates are ambiguous and/or incomplete: 01-02-02, 04/02, 1995, etc. Thus resulting in a big mess and thus on large problems in ordering them and navigating in the time over the content.

To solve the above problems and cope with the high complexity and disambiguation, we have:

• realized sophisticated algorithms that perform the regularization and disambiguation of the dates, allowing and performing date classification and resolution, processing all kind of obtained metadata (mining dates from any field of the several collected textual and and non textual metadata) coming in 13 different languages.
• processed all the ECLAP content obtained about 940.000 dates. Thus an average of about 5 dates for each object has been found.
• provided ECLAP Timeline tool to access at the content in time, by browsing on the time line and selecting the different date kind. On the tool, you can: zoom, select the date of interest filtering the others, access to the corresponding content and play them.

So that, you can see the evolution of content and artistic work along the time, depending on the date kind. On this basis, more sophisticated analysis are also possible and can be produced for affiliated partners only.