Casual Querying: Facilitating Information Dissemination in Ad-hoc Environments

Data-driven dashboards have now become ubiquitous. Environments such as information kiosks in public spaces, dashboards in cars, or smart televisions at home – all cater to a casual form of data exploration, where the user may have a quick-and-simple information need. In contrast to long and complex database query sessions for experts, casual queries pose two requirements to the query interface. First, queries (or the results to queries) need to be discoverable by the end-user. Second, a user may often not issue a query at all, in which case the system still needs to provide some information to the user. Given these requirements, we present a case study of The Invisible Library, an interactive exhibit that presents log analysis as public art.