Collaborative Information Space Analysis Tools
Robert T. Neches, Sameer Abhinkar, Fangqi Hu, Ragy Eleish, In‐Young Ko, Ke-Thia Yao, Quan Zhu, Peter M. Will · D-Lib Magazine · 1998
The DASHER Project at USC/ISI has focused upon helping organizations with rapid-response mission requirements. Such organizations need to be able to quickly stand up tiger teams backed by the information, materiel, and support services they need to do their job. To do so, they need to find and assess sources of those services who are potential participants in the tiger team. To support this very initial phase of team development, the project has developed information analysis tools that help make sense of sets of data sources in an intranet or internet: characterizing them, partitioning them, sorting and filtering them. These tools focus on three key issues in forming a collaborative team: helping individuals responsible for forming the team to understand what is available, helping them structure and categorize on the information available to them in a manner specifically suited to the task at hand, and helping them understand the mappings between their organization of the information and those used by others who might participate. DASHER’s Information Space Analysis Tools are unique in combining multiple methods to assist in this task. This makes the suite particularly well-suited to integrating additional technologies in order to create specialized systems.