¹Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.

Correspondence: Paul E. Keel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 32 Vassar Street, Room 32-258, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307, U.S.A. Tel.: +1 617 252 1866; Fax: +1 617 249 0730; E-mail: keel@mit.edu

Received 23 June 2006; Revised 31 July 2006; Accepted 20 October 2006; Published online 11 January 2007.

Abstract

We introduce EWall, an experimental visual analytics environment for the support of remote-collaborative sense-making activities. EWall is designed to foster and support 'object focused thinking', where users represent and understand information as objects, construct and recognize contextual relationships among objects, as well as communicate through objects. EWall also offers a unified infrastructure for the implementation and testing of computational agents that consolidate user contributions and manage the flow of information among users through the creation and management of a 'virtual transactive memory'. EWall users operate their individual graphical interfaces to collect, abstract, organize and comprehend task-relevant information relative to their areas of expertise. A first type of computational agents infers possible relationships among information items through the analysis of the spatial and temporal organization and collaborative use of information. All information items and relationships converge in a shared database. A second type of computational agents evaluates the contents of the shared database and provides individual users with a customized selection of potentially relevant information. A learning mechanism allows the computational agents to adapt to particular users and circumstances. EWall is designed to enable individual users to navigate vast amounts of shared information effectively and help remotely dispersed team members combine their contributions, work independently without diverting from common objectives, and minimize the necessary amount of verbal communication.