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exploration and analysis is an important and solvable problem. We expect this
solution will have important implications for many areas of human endeavor that
necessitate the handling of complex data.
3 Co-located Collaborative Visualization
Given the choice, it is common and natural for people to work together. This is
not a new phenomenon. Small groups of people gather for all kinds of reasons
including many that are work related; such as to get a job done faster, to share
expertise for a complex task, and to benefit from different insights from different
people. Also, when one considers the rapid growth in size and complexity of
datasets, it is not surprising that increasingly the practicality of an individual
analyzing an entire data-set is becoming unrealistic. Instead, the expertise to
analyze and make informed decisions about these information-rich datasets is
often best accomplished by a team [91]. For instance, imagine a team of medical
practitioners examining a patient's medical record to plan an operation, a team
of biologists looking at test results to find causes for a disease, or a team of
businessmen planning next year's budgets based on a large financial dataset. All
of these situations involve a group of people making use of visual information to
proceed with their work. Research towards supporting these team-based infor-
mation processes will expand the situations in which information visualization
can be used and is part of considering how to best support people in their normal
everyday information work practices.
This section draws from a wide variety of literature to shed light on questions
and issues that need to be considered during the development of co-located
collaborative information visualizations. We do not consider this discussion to be
exhaustive; rather it is our intention that the discussion will form the beginning of
design guidelines and considerations that will be modified and extended through
future research in collaborative information visualization.
Research in information visualization draws from the intellectual history of
several traditions, including computer graphics, human-computer interaction,
cognitive psychology, semiotics, graphic design, statistical graphics, cartogra-
phy, and art [64]. The synthesis of relevant ideas from these fields is critical
for the design and evaluation of information visualization in general and it is
only sensible to think that fields concerned with collaborative work also add
valuable information to our understand-ing of requirements for collaborative in-
formation visualization systems. Our sources include work in co-located collab-
oration in computer supported cooperative work [39,53,75,73,76,77,80,81,82,90],
information visualization [85,105,109,110,111], and empirical work investigating
collaborative visualization use [61,68,72].
The organization of this section is as follows. A brief overview of existing
research that relates to co-located collaborative information analysis is given in
section 3.1. Next, section 3.2 discusses the impact of recent advances in hardware
configurations and section 3.3 focuses on more general human computer inter-
action issues important for the support of the co-located collaborative process,
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