Branch-explore-merge: facilitating real-time revision control in collaborative visual exploration

  • Authors:

  • Will McGrath;Brian Bowman;David McCallum;Juan David Hincapié-Ramos;Niklas Elmqvist;Pourang Irani

  • Affiliations:

  • Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA;Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA;University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada;University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada;Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA;University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2012 ACM international conference on Interactive tabletops and surfaces
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Collaborative work is characterized by participants seamlessly transitioning from working together (coupled) to working alone (decoupled). Groupware should therefore facilitate smoothly varying coupling throughout the entire collaborative session. Towards achieving such transitions for collaborative exploration and search, we propose a protocol based on managing revisions for each collaborator exploring a dataset. The protocol allows participants to diverge from the shared analysis path (branch), study the data independently (explore), and then contribute back their findings onto the shared display (merge). We apply this concept to collaborative search in multidimensional data, and propose an implementation where the public view is a tabletop display and the private views are embedded in handheld tablets. We then use this implementation to perform a qualitative user study involving a real estate dataset. Results show that participants leverage the BEM protocol, spend \ significant time using their private views (40% to 80% of total task time), and apply public view changes for consultation with collaborators.