Launching context-aware visualisations

Abstract

Web is more pervasive than ever: it is being used with an increasing range of browsers and devices for a plethora of tasks. As such, exciting possibilities for information visualisation have become available: data is potentially highly relevant, easy to access and readily available in structured formats. For the task of visualisation, the diversity of the Web is both a challenge and an opportunity: while rich data may be available in well-defined structures, they need to be extracted from an open ecosystem of different data formats and interfaces. In this article, we will present how context-aware visualisations can be launched from target Web applications. Methods for accessing and capturing data and web usage context are presented. We will also present proof-of-concept examples for integrating launchable context-aware visualisations to target applications. We claim that by maintaining loose coupling to target Web applications and combining several data and context capturing methods, visualisations can be effectively launched from arbitrary Web applications with rich usage context information and input data. © Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 2010.