Collaborative information linking: Bridging knowledge gaps between users by linking across applications

Information exploration processes are often conducted in teams of experts, family members, or colleagues. These teams have to retrieve information from different sources, verify it, and finally compare and discuss their findings to find consensus. Today, support for these collaborative processes is limited and users often end up sharing either a single PC with one user taking control or using separate workstations, where support for tight collaboration is limited. In this paper, we present collaborative information linking which visually connects information across private and shared application windows to bridge knowledge gaps between users. We present the technical infrastructure for multi-user interaction and personalized meta-visualizations on large multi-projector displays, and demonstrate how personalized visual links connect information across existing applications modified in a minimally invasive manner. An observational experiment showed that information linking helps individuals to deal with large display space and teams to switch between individual information retrieval and joint verification and discussion.