Information visualization for collaborative computing

Information technology continues to generate increasing amounts of data, most of which is useless without scalable methods to collect, analyze, process, and understand it. Visualization is a promising approach to such systemization because it lets users see underlying processes and guide process simulations interactively. However, visualization must be combined with some way to make repositories of text documents more manageable, providing users with a flexible, interactive environment in which to access them. The article describes a prototype tool that addresses these problems for GroupSystems, an electronic meeting system developed at the University of Arizona and installed at more than 1,500 business, government, and university settings. The tool automatically categorizes information, statistically clusters similar documents, and displays the organized document set graphically, providing more at-a-glance information than a typical text based display. Users can thus more easily browse document collections. The tool uses text analysis techniques that aim to identify descriptors and develop an unambiguous internal representation of a document.