Collaborative interactive visualization: exploratory concept

Dealing with an ever increasing amount of data is a challenge that military intelligence analysts or team of analysts face day to day. Increased individual and collective comprehension goes through collaboration between people. Better is the collaboration, better will be the comprehension. Nowadays, various technologies support and enhance collaboration by allowing people to connect and collaborate in settings as varied as across mobile devices, over networked computers, display walls, tabletop surfaces, to name just a few. A powerful collaboration system includes traditional and multi-modal visualization features to achieve effective human communication. Interactive visualization strengthens collaboration because this approach is conducive to incrementally building a mental assessment of the data meaning. The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the envisioned collaboration architecture and the interactive visualization concepts underlying the Sensemaking Support System prototype developed to support analysts in the context of the Joint Intelligence Collection and Analysis Capability project at DRDC Valcartier. It presents the current version of the architecture, discusses future capabilities to help analyst(s) in the accomplishment of their tasks and finally recommends collaboration and visualization technologies allowing to go a step further both as individual and as a team.