Does a timeline function exist?

[Viraaj-A]

Does Open-notebook have a timeline creation function with citations?

Trying to find an alternative to NotebookLM's timeline creation tool.

[lfnovo]

Hey.. no, we don't yet. But that's a cool idea. I will keep track of it. how would that be useful to you? Can you walk me through what you'd use it for?

[Viraaj-A]

Hey thanks for the reply.

I'm a not for profit legal provider, and we receive a significant amount of disclosure. One of the tasks that we need to do is create a timeline, with citations, across all the documents. I've seen some other legal tools that do this, but of course they are paid and not open-source so unsure about its reliability.

I've done a bit more research after posting the above comment. It seems the method that a timeline or any other specific metadata tool is created is by running an LLM across the text that is being embedded to extract metadata, then utilising that metadata in the RAG search for the purpose of a specific task. For example, timeline creation, individual analysis (police officers, witnesses etc). The list goes on. To this end, I was wondering whether if its possible to create an extended LLM metadata creation tool on top of the embedding stack that Open-notebook already utilises. When a user uploads the document, the usual embedding occurs alongside a custom embedding.

Ps Google Notebook has a timeline function but it is not great.

Hopefully the above made sense! Thanks

[lfnovo]

Moving this from Q&A to Ideas and keeping it open. The legal disclosure workflow described here—building a cited chronology across many documents—is exactly the kind of concrete use case we want to preserve.

Open Notebook does not currently offer a dedicated timeline artifact. Before implementation is scoped, useful input includes the expected output format, which dates and events matter, how contradictory sources should appear, the required citation precision, and how users need to correct or export the result. This Discussion will remain the product conversation for that need.

[lfnovo]

Status refresh: timelines fit the artifacts part of #1315 — generated outputs that keep the evidence they were built from, so a timeline entry can open the passage it came from. Question 6 there asks which generated output should come first; if timelines are it for you, say so.