I know this is way late in the game and probably won't even be read, but then who knows? I was reading back this far..

There is a cute little open source project called SIMILE Timeline (along with some others). I have been implementing it at work to show events(and each events details when mouse clicked) on a mfg line. I have been very impressed with it. It has a small but active user group on google groups.

Be warned, et is poorly documented at best. However, with a bit of playing around with the examples, it does not take too long to have a very nice timeline. I use perl on the back end to talk to a database and spit out XML to populate the timeline with events. Very fast, very simple. I will quit plugging it and just give the url.

SIMILE