Exploiting activity data in the academic environment

James S Perrin

To display multiple discrete events which have a start and end time, such as meetings, in a diary/calendar like plot.

The Access Grid activity data quite literally describes what a group of people were doing at discrete periods of time i.e. have an Access Grid meetings. It is therefore of benefit to present this data in a calendar or diary format to describe when the activities at virtual venue or physical node were occurring. We could look at room booking data but this only shows what was proposed to happen, meetings occur ad- hoc or cancelled without updating the system. The diary format allows trends and patterns in actual room usage to be observed. We could go further and use cyclic plots to compare activity on a week by week basis say.

We assume that each event occurs within one day ie starts after 00:00 and finishes before 24:00 the same day (we can clamp the data if necessary). The timestamps should be give the time and date, UNIX timestamps (seconds since UNIX Epoch) are most easy to handle.

The user is already familiar with basic GNUplot commands and usage.

GNUplot has its own epoch value and Excel using a floating point number for timestamps.

Set Arrow Styles

We want to use flat headed arrows to show the extent of each event.

Set Time Format and Axes

Tell GNUplot that time will be plotted on both X and Y axes:

and let it know that the value will be in UNIX time:

Then tell GNUplot how to format the axes, the date along the X and time along the Y axis:

of course we should label the axes too:

Manipulating and Plotting the Data

Let’s assume the start and end times are in columns 1 and 2.

Multiple events occurring on the same day should be vertically aligned ie plotted at whole days rather than at a day plus seven hours and fourteen minutes. The x values are therefore rounded down using the following expression:

Where 86400 is the number of seconds in day. The floor() function is used as a belt and braces approach to convert the (by default) float value into an integer. Along the Y axis we just need the time of day, using the modulus operator and the seconds per day we get the remainder:

GNUplot vectors use a start point and a relative offset (x,y,dx,dy) so all we need to compute the duration of the event is:

Putting these expressions altogether in the plot command as follows:

The data is plotted with vectors using the arrowstyle (as) 1 that was defined earlier.

Output Data

The batch_timetable.plt GNUplot script is available as part of our log parsing package: