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TCDL Bulletin Real-time Collaboration through Visual Search and Voice-over-IP
A demonstration of the SolonEvo application was conducted at JCDL 2006. The application provides a visual interface to conduct contextual information seeking. SolonEvo presents the result-set of a query to a digital library or other online information resource as both a ranked list and a 2-dimensional visual presentation. The presentation embodies clusters of documents that contain similar content. Tools that allow manipulation of these clusters are also included. This interface was modified to allow real-time collaboration, allowing users to conduct Voice-over-IP telephony calls, instant messaging and sharing of documents, result-sets and document metadata. The authors can envision numerous circumstances where two remotely located parties may wish to opportunistically examine an online resource – e-learning environments for example. The authors were particularly interested in assisting users whose collaboration resolves around discussion of a common visual resource (documents and collections of documents in the case under discussion). By providing a single tool for information seeking and multi-user collaboration, we believe that the amount of preparation required for an online session is reduced, while the flexibility allowed to parties to conduct ad-hoc examinations of a resource is increased. The demonstration examined how a search might be conducted using the combination of a ranked list and visualization. Information sharing – single documents, query result-sets and metadata – was also demonstrated using an instant messaging session.
Further information about the application can be found at <http://www.cs.ucc.ie/~hoare/>. © Copyright 2007 Cathal Hoare and Humphrey Sorensen Top | Contents |
