Appearance
Timeline & events
The timeline is the chronological backbone of Atlas — every geolocated event, every filing, every news pin lives on a single time axis you can scrub through. Implemented in frontend/src/components/TimelineBar.jsx with the backend at backend/routes/timeline.py and backend/routes/events.py.
Why it's separate from the globe
The globe is live by default — it shows now. The timeline overlays what happened when. Same events, two surfaces:
- Globe answers "where is X right now."
- Timeline answers "what happened around event Y, and what was the sequence."
Scrubbing the timeline rewinds the globe accordingly: vessel positions, aircraft tracks, and news pins all replay to the timestamp under the cursor.
Event sources
Events come from three feeds:
- News with geolocation — headlines tagged with a lat/lon (e.g., a refinery fire, a port closure).
- Vessel and aircraft port-of-call events — entry, exit, anchor, sustained-speed-change milestones from the AIS/ADS-B streams.
- Custom user-pinned events — drop a pin on the globe with a note; it lands on the timeline.
Working with the timeline
- Click an event — the globe focuses on the event location and time.
- Drag the playhead — replays the live layers historically.
- Filter by event type — narrow to news / vessel / aircraft / custom.
- Bookmark a moment — save a permalink that re-opens at the same playhead position.
How it composes with other panels
| Pair with | Reason |
|---|---|
| Globe | Historical replay of vessel/aircraft positions |
| News | Sequence the news around an event time |
| Security dashboard — Disclosures | Filings + news + price reaction in one timeline |
| AI chat | Ask "what happened in this region between dates X and Y?" with the active timeline window in context |
Limits
- Historical replay depth depends on the AIS/ADS-B retention (typically rolling 30 days). For older events, the news pins remain but the live tracks may not.
- Custom user pins are private to your account; sharing happens via permalink.
- The timeline is not a Bloomberg-style chronological terminal — for per-instrument earnings/filing chronology, prefer the Security dashboard.
Tips
- Use the timeline as the entry point for an OSINT investigation: pick a date, fan out across globe + news.
- For a vessel-focused investigation, filter the timeline to vessel events first, then layer in news.
- Combine timeline scrubbing with AI chat for narrative summaries — "describe what happened in the Persian Gulf on April 12."