Maestro: Design Challenges for a Group Calendar

Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 2017

Whether it is sunrise, the weekend, or Christmas, some form of temporal structure or periodic pattern governs our daily activities. Understanding them is essential to making sense of human activity, because they frame normality and allow us to identify abnormalities. However, cultural heterogeneity and scale greatly complicate our ability to uncover and understand human activity at a given time within a region. Current research in the field of visual analytics and geography provide methods of addressing spatiotemporal periodicity, but they fall short in providing access to multiple spatial and temporal scales via a relevant calendar. In response to these shortcomings, we developed PerSE (periodicity in spatiotemporal events), a coordinated-view Web application designed to aid users in the detection and analysis of calendar-related periodicity in spatiotemporal event data sets. Given the complexity of such a visualization tool, this paper focuses on the usability and learnability of ...

2002

In this paper, we describe Augur, a groupware calendar system to support personal calendaring practices, informal workplace communication, and the socio-technical evolution of the calendar system within a workgroup. Successful design and deployment of groupware calendar systems have been shown to depend on several converging, interacting perspectives. We describe calendar-based work practices as viewed from these perspectives, and present the Augur system in support of them. Augur allows users to retain the flexibility of personal calendars by anticipating and compensating for inaccurate calendar entries and idiosyncratic event names. We employ predictive user models of event attendance, intelligent processing of calendar text, and discovery of shared events to drive novel calendar visualizations that facilitate interpersonal communication. In addition, we visualize calendar access to support privacy management and long-term evolution of the calendar system.

Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems - CHI EA '11, 2011

This paper focuses on capturing, correlating and visualizing the execution of a meeting from the history data. Relevant artifacts that are utilized or generated during a meeting as well as meeting activities and resources are mapped onto a generic meeting data model. The execution of a meeting is then captured as a graph where generated meeting artifacts, participants and meeting tasks are connected. The graph enables faster and structured access to meeting data and provides for a visualization capability for users who want to browse quickly the sections of the meeting that are of most interest.

This research paper tries to raise some key questions in the quest for interactive time-based information visualization. Since our ultimate goal is to specify and develop a web-based system for this task that will most likely be a mashup using existent geographical data, we first explain and discuss mashups. We then try to identify a number of use cases for such a system, followed by a state of the art overview. We then try to devise a categorization for the display of and interaction with time-based geospatial data, and close with a discussion of particular challenges identified in the context of the project described in this paper.

GeoInformatica, 2016

Periodicity is embedded in all societies. As most of us organize our lives based on temporal structures, it is hard to imagine what life would be like without it. We experience periodicity through naturally occurring rhythms that exist in nature, such as sunrise/sunset, seasonal changes in the weather, and the tides. We also experience it through abstract means via cultural, political, religious ties, such as the weekend, Independence Day, and Ramadan. Forms of periodicity, like the examples above, are foundational to making sense of human activity because they provide contextual rationale and frame normaility. However, disparate calendars (e.g. Islamic vs. Gregorian), localized idiosyncrasies, and other variables greatly complicate the analytical ability to uncover and understand human activity at a given time within a specified region. We have developed PerSE (Periodicity in Spatiotemporal Events): a web application designed to aid users in the detection and analysis of calendar related periodicity in spatiotemporal event data sets via exploratory user interaction. PerSE is composed of several crossfiltering views: the Map, Attribute View, Time-Wheel, Timeline, and Table. Users interactively set and release filters on one or more of the views to detect and analyze calendar related periodicity. This paper illustrates the utility of PerSE through an in-depth description of the tool and proof of concept usage example.

Chi 03 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2003

Calendar applications for small handheld devices such as PDAs are growing in popularity. This led us to develop FishCal, a novel calendar interface for PDAs. It supports users in performing planning and analysis tasks by using a fisheye representation of dates coupled with compact overviews, user control over the visible time period, and integrated search. This enables users to see overviews and to easily navigate the calendar structure, and to discover patterns and outliers. FishCal was evaluated in a benchmark usability study comparing it to Microsoft's Pocket PC 2002™ calendar. Eleven users performed complex tasks significantly faster and completed them more often with FishCal. Task by task user satisfaction data showed a significant advantage for FishCal as well. A number of usability issues were identified to aid in the iterative refinement of FishCal.

2004

Various graphical travel itinerary visualization systems have in recent years been developed to allow making easier references between different events such as flights and hotel bookings on a travel itinerary, thereby addressing a problem with tabular itineraries which list travel events in a chronological order of date and time, and only allow referencing consecutive events. These graphical travel itinerary systems are based on a linear visualization of travel events. Although this linear visualization deals with some of the problems associated with tabular itineraries, it is not the only form of visualization which might be capable of addressing these issues. This paper introduces a new visualization of travel itineraries, called the calendar visualization, which relies on a more familiar concept of calendars to depict the relationships between travel events. This paper also describes an empirical study undertaken to compare the calendar and linear itinerary visualizations.

2016

Today, the need for interaction and visualization techniques to fulfill user requirements for collaborative work is ever increasing. Current approaches do not suffice since they do not consider the simultaneous work of participating users, different views of the data being analyzed, or the exchange of information between different data emphases. We introduce Intuitive Collaboration (IN2CO), a scalable visualization framework that supports decision-making processes concerning multilevels and multi-roles. IN2CO improves the state of the art by integrating ubiquitous technologies and existing techniques to explore and manipulate data and dependencies collaboratively. A prototype has been tested by mechanical engineers with expertise in factory planning. Preliminary results imply that IN2CO supports communication and decision-making in a team-oriented manner.

2002

Abstract Dynamic interactive visualisations (DIVs) are intended to help coordination and collaboration, through augmenting existing forms of synchronous communication (ie phones, face to face, walkie-talkie). A central feature of a DIV is active user involvement: users are required to create, annotate, and change the information visualisation to represent the changes in the activity space they are concerned with. One benefit of doing so is to enable users to externalise and offload some of the cognitive effort involved.