A panel in two parts where you can see events both on a map and in a timeline. They are synched.
You can add event streams based on people, places, actions, etc.
You can filter streams by date ranges, geographical areas, entities, etc.
Of course, the content of this panel can be piped (UNIX-style) to any other panel.
In fact, this will be one of the primitives of the system.
You can also zoom in and out semantically. Imagine starting with all "sieges" visualised and then pulling back and seeing all "military actions" of any kind.
Or what about seeing actions which didn't actually take place happen but which someone planned to carry out.
A history of intentions, realised and unrealised.
I don't know if real historians would care about this, but I'd love to see it. I've started it already.
It's not counterfactual history: it's based on intentions stated in letters, diaries, etc.
Imagine then doing a query on overlap between actual events and intended events ...
Then filter that stream to remove certain people, groups, action subtypes, places, etc.
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Implication: to reduce the complexity and breakability of your logic, produce better-defined data-structures which reduce the need for complex and error-prone operations.
Graph-as-infrastructure
versus
Graph-as-diagram (diagraph?)
What if part of the problem is that we conflate graph structure (a -[r]-> b) with the visualisation of the graph? Sometimes these are do match but other times we need distance from the structure in order to model diagrammatically. We could mix graph + SVG shapes + text.
We could think of graph-as-diagram as separation of concerns from the graph structure itself ...