The Collaborative Timeline is a web-based, data-driven graphical interface that allows a group of users to collaboratively map historical events across multiple categories. Events can be added and edited by any member of the user community. Community members can also add threaded discussion comments and upload multiple files to document each event. Different colored links mapping relationships among different events can also be created. Members can flag historically important events, and the events can be filtered by combinations of individual user flags to display different historical perspectives on the data. All levels of the timeline data, including events, commentary, and links are fully searchable.
The Collaborative Timeline application architecture consists of a Flash frontend that passes XML requests to Java servlets that query and edit data in a MySQL database. The application package is easily deployable in most server environments. I designed and developed the timeline in 2000-2001 with the assistance of Vince and Tony Dorie, who helped develop the Java servlets and the database backend.