Spatio-Temporal Discussion Board

In this paper, we address the particular challenges for collaborative, multi-disciplinary analysis posed by today’s data rich environments, by designing the Spatio-Temporal Discussion Board, a method for collaborative long-term analysis in Geo-Visual Analytics environments. Our hypothesis is that having a clear defined context and boundary for discussions will help in focusing analysts’ attention, and elicit sensible information. For this aim, the method enables users to define explicit context and boundaries for map-based discussions, which is particularly useful for data spaces that have a large spatial and temporal extent. Within these boundaries, analysts can build knowledge by exchanging pieces of information in the form of written messages, playing roles such as background information, question, hypothesis, evidence and conclusions. Additionally, this messages can be enriched with annotations over the visual products, and attached files. As proof of concept, a prototype was developed and the results show that currently available web-technologies are suitable to implement the proposed method.