Geo-historical context support for information foraging and sensemaking: Conceptual model, implementation, and assessment

Information foraging and sensemaking with heterogeneous information are context-dependent activities. Thus visual analytics tools to support these activities must incorporate context. But, context is a difficult concept to define, model, and represent. Creating and representing context in support of visually-enabled reasoning about complex problems with complex information is a complementary but different challenge than that addressed in context-aware computing. In the latter, the goal is automated adaptation of the system to meet user needs for applications such as mobile location-based services where information about the location, the user, and the user goals filters what gets presented on a small mobile device. In contrast, for visual analytics-enabled information foraging and sensemaking, the user is likely to take an active role in foraging for the contextual information needed to support sensemaking in relation to some multifaceted problem. In this paper, we address the challen...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: IEEEVAST
• Authors: Brian M. Tomaszewski, Alan M. MacEachren
• Keywords: Context Discovery Application, Emerging Technology, IEEEVAST 2010, Information, Sensemaking