Collaborative visualization: a review and taxonomy

We present a brief review of 42 collaborative visualization systems, grouped into four application areas: collaborative problem-solving environments, virtual reality environments, multi-player online games and multi-user enabling of single user applications. The systems are then compared by five attributes: number of simultaneous users, user access control, communication architecture, type of transmitted data and user synchronization. We review the characteristic properties of each application area, overall trends in characteristics and recommend improvements for future systems. The taxonomy of visualization and accompanying bibliography are available on-line via the RAVE project pages by Grimstead, I.J., (2005), with on-line references hyper-linked where available.