Supporting Visual Analysis in Smart Meeting Rooms

Smart meeting rooms as a specific form of multi-display environments (MDE) feature ad-hoc ensembles of heterogeneous devices and software tools to facilitate collective work and information sharing between multiple users. This makes them excellent environments for supporting visual analytics sessions. Effective use of MDE requires not only appropriate visual representations of the information needed by each user for her current task but also the efficient utilization of available display space by means of suitable view management. In this paper, we propose a task-driven approach to Smart View Management that combines automated task-based view configuration with interactive user specification of selected analysis task aspects. It is based on a general task typology capable of expressing the role of individual data views with respect to a given, possibly compound analysis task. The feasibility of the proposed approach is discussed by virtue of a use case from the climate impact research domain.