So Many users - So Many Perspectives

Visualization — the transformation of data and information into multimedia including pictures, animation and 3D scenes — enables users to understand information more naturally. It reveals patterns and relations in the information which may otherwise remain hidden. As a consequence, it can provide a single user with enough valuable information to support decision making. In addition to this, visualization can also be used to explain information to other people. In this case, the results of visualization are deployed as arguments in collaborative decision making. This paper discusses a distributed visualization architecture which supports collaborative decision making. The architecture is designed with the following consideration in mind: “multiple users, with different information needs, require multiple views or perspectives of the data.” Additionally, in order to support the cooperation between users during the decision making process, we extend the architecture with collaborative aspects including session management, and the exchange of visualization perspectives.