Visualization-based approaches to support context sharing towards public involvement support system

Abstract

In order to facilitate public involvement in the consensus building process needed for community development, a lot of time and effort needs to be spent on assessing and sharing public concerns. This paper presents new approaches for support for context sharing that involve visualizing public meeting records. The first approach is to visualize the transition of topics to enable the user to grasp an overview and to find specific arguments. The second is to visualize topic-related information to enable the user to understand background. The third is to visualize the auditory scene to enable the user to find and to listen to paralinguistic (prosodic) information contained in audio recordings. These approaches are designed on the basis of Visual Information-Seeking Mantra, "Overview first, zoom and filter, then details on demand." These approaches support citizens and stakeholders to find, to track, and to understand target arguments from the records of a public meeting. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.