Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Interaction Issues:
Most interaction issues deal with interaction with repre-
sentations, presentations and views, thus discussing them here would overlap
with points raised under these headings. However, there are some more general
interaction issues. When people are co-located, they are in the situation in which
people naturally collaborate, the situation in which people have collaborated for
centuries. When face-to-face, people naturally know how to collaborate and are
so used to picking up subtle cues from each other that they may do this without
even being conscious of the precise details of the underlying coordination and
communication practices that are in play. As the developers of co-located collab-
orative information visualizations, our task is to facilitate information access and
exploration without interfering with the social protocols that make collaboration
effective. However, to do this we have to understand what these social collabo-
ration practices are and specifically if there are any differences when people are
collaborating using visual information. Some factors are:
Interactive Response Rates:
Information visualization has always had a lot of
requirements in that it deals with extremely large and complex data sets and
in that it can have considerable graphics requirements for these complex rep-
resentations. Adding larger screens, more screens, higher pixel counts, multiple
simultaneous inputs, and possibly multiple representations will increase compu-
tational load adding more requirements to the challenge of maintaining good
interactive rates. Thus implementations of collaborative information visualiza-
tions will have to be carefully designed for eciency. While continued hardware
advances will mitigate this to some extent, it will be important to address issues
in both ecient data processing and fast graphic rendering.
Interaction History:
A history task has been defined as a task that involves
keeping a history of actions to support undo, replay, and progressive refinement
[85]. In a collaborative scenario keeping such a history can have other benefits.
If a visualization tracks and reveals which data items have been visited and by
whom this information could be valuable for collaborators helping them under-
stand their team members' actions, find unexplored parts of a visualization or to
confirm discoveries made by others. A visualized interaction history may support
collaboration by promoting mutual understanding of team members involvement
in the task [24] and may help keep group members aware of each others actions
as people shift from individual to shared views of the data [39]. An exploration
history can be useful in such activities as validating work done, in explaining a
discovery process to other team members, and in supporting discussions about
data explorations.
Information Access:
Exactly how to handle information access is an important
collaboration issue. The main themes in the research discussion thus far have
been motivated by social protocol issues and data centric concerns. While these
have not been seen as mutually exclusive they are quite distinct ideas. The so-
cial protocol theme has made considerable use of observational studies to better
understand exactly what are the social protocols and how do they impact col-
laboration. These understandings are then used as a basis for software design.
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