The Appearance/Ranking module is capable of working with the following column types

• Numerical columns (int, double, float etc.)
  • The element's value is directly used by the function
• Dynamic numerical columns (timestamp/intervals)
  • The column Estimator (min, max, avg etc.) is used to "flatten" out the set of timestamps/intervals to obtain a single numerical value
  • The set of timestamps/interval to flatten is either the complete TimeMap object or a subset in case of a filter graph (essentially when the timeline is active)

What is missing is still the timeset column that controls the appearance of elements in the graph. Main use case is to transform the graph so that the time dimension is visualized. For example, if each node is an event I would like to use the color gradient to see which events came first and so on.

Proposed solution

The timestamp or interval column should simply appear in the appearance column chooser.

Behind the scene, each timestamp or interval start/end is already a double number so we can easily use that as the element's value. We do need to "flatten" as well as well to obtain a single value per element. We could attach an Estimator to that column as well.

Alternatives considered

If using an Estimator with Timeset is not possible, we could limit to min or max, but it would be good to be configurable as I see use-cases in both directions.

Additional context

By default, we expect only one column of type TimeSet but if we can we should loosen up that restriction and ideally all column of that type can be used in Appearance easily.