This is Part 6 of 7 of the highlights from “Illuminating the Path: The Research and Development Agenda for Visual Analytics.” Please see this post for an introduction to the study and access to the other 6 parts.
Mobile Technologies
The National Visual Analytics Center (NVAC) study recognizes that “mobile technologies will play a role in visual analytics, especially to users at the front line of homeland security.” To this end, researchers must “devise new methods to best employ these technologies and provide a means to allow data to scale between high-resolution displays in command and control centers to field-deployable displays.”
Collaborative Analytics
While collaborative platforms from wiki’s to Google docs allow many individuals to work collaboratively, these functionalities rarely feature in crisis mapping platforms. And yet, humanitarian crises (just like homeland security challenges) are so complex that they cannot be addressed by individuals working in silos.
On the contrary, crisis analysis, civilian protection and humanitarian response efforts are “sufficiently large scale and important that they must be addressed through the coordinated action of multiple groups of people, often with different backgrounds working in disparate locations with differing information.”
In other words, “the issue of human scalability plays a critical role, as systems must support the communications needs of these groups of people working together across space and time, in high-stress and time-sensitive environments, to make critical decisions.”
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