Web-Based Visualization of Student Cooperation during Distributed Laboratory Experimentation

This work addresses the problem of visualizing hardly formalized relations i.e. connections between distributed collaborating experimenters. These dependencies are not measurable and hard to determine. It is proposed to determine the relations using the measurable and determinable connections between software agents acting on behalf of the users. A connection between the agents is treated as the proof for relation between their owners. A method of system structure data acquisition is proposed, which consists of capturing and interpreting the communication traffic between the agents. The content of the traffic is analyzed and presented in formalized form, according to the developed XML Schema. An example of graphical visualization is provided, presenting the mesh of inter-user relations as an interactive graph. An automated spatial clusterization of the graph components is performed, resulting in optical information on the current state of collaboration.