Towards an Adaptive Visualization System in Context-Aware Environments

To provide good visibility of present and potential future contexts and improve system usability and effectiveness, context-aware systems need support for developing effective visualizations of both context and user problem data. However, it is quite difficult to maintain visualization effectiveness across different problem domains, stakeholders, purposes and/or time. Although many existing visualization techniques can provide reasonable support for developing visualizations effective under a certain context, they are still weak for maintaining visualization effectiveness under varying contexts. To address these problems and requirements, this paper discusses contextual factors that may affect visualization effectiveness and proposes a context adaptive visualization framework to guide the development of visualization systems that can be embedded in or used together with context-aware systems in order to develop and maintain effective visualizations. Furthermore, it demonstrates an implementation of the proposed framework through a sequence of context-driven visualizations.