Visualization of Web-based Workspace Structures

Web-based collaboration is becoming increasingly common. Often such collaboration exhibits emergent characteristics, for which systems based on a notion of workspaces provide suitable support. Virtual teams collaborating in this manner create virtual organizational structures, the capture and retention of which into organizational memory promises to be of benefit, as it can facilitate reuse. Visualization of workspace structures plays an important role in the effort to identify, and then capture, these structures. The visualization presented here represents workspaces as nodes in a two-dimensional graph, with edges representing inter-workspace relationships. These graphs are visualized using an animated force-directed algorithm. Colour is employed in various ways to reveal additional dimensions of workspace properties. The visualization of intra-workspace relationships is also supported. An example illustrates how the visualization can aid in the identification of collaborative structures using the presented visualization tools.