Supporting Handoff in Asynchronous Collaborative Sensemaking Using Knowledge-Transfer Graphs.

Area of Science:

• Information Science
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Collaborative Systems

Background:

• Asynchronous collaborative analysis presents challenges in effectively communicating investigative processes and findings between analysts.
• Externalizations of partial findings often fail to adequately convey the analyst's thought process and methodology.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate techniques for automatically capturing tacit aspects of the investigative process.
• To streamline the creation of explicit handoff annotations for collaborative analysis.
• To improve awareness of analysis coverage, progress, and uncertainty in asynchronous collaborative analysis.

Main Methods:

• Developed techniques to automatically capture analyst interactions and encode tacit investigative process aspects.
• Integrated these techniques into an interactive visual analysis system, KTGraph.
• Conducted a two-phase user study to evaluate handoff strategies and investigative performance.

Main Results:

• The developed techniques promoted more effective handoff strategies among analysts.
• Participants demonstrated increased awareness of prior investigative processes and insights.
• Investigative performance and final outcomes were improved when using the new techniques.

Conclusions:

• Automatic capture of investigative processes and streamlined annotations enhance asynchronous collaborative analysis.
• Improved communication of tacit knowledge and explicit progress leads to better analytical outcomes.
• The KTGraph system and its integrated techniques offer a promising solution for complex document analysis tasks.