An interesting find by Matt and some coaxing lead me to implementing the MIT Simile Timeline project found at http://www.simile-widgets.org/timeline/, the website also provides an API for the few functions Timeline has. I use timeline in my actitime-rc project to track when emails are being sent.  This is nice for people who just want a summary of the information being shared in the project. To populate the timeline I created a simple servlet which grabs information from the database and creates a JSON string to populate the timeline.