Sensemaking and Provenance in Distributed Collaborative Node-Link Visualizations

Various experts often work together during the analysis of large and complex data sets in order to minimize the required time and to improve the quality of the analysis results. Keeping track of the reasoning involved during a collaborative process and using this information later to review and reflect upon it can be a challenging task. For instance, analysts should have the possibility to quickly review changes performed on a graph and get an idea of the most interest- ing regions according to the user history without the need to replay every single action that was performed by prior users. This paper focuses on challenges during the collection and visualization of the sensemaking process in distributed collaborative node-link visual- izations. We raise five challenges that we think need discussion among researchers in this domain and present our tool OnGraX— a web-based collaborative tool for analyzing networks—that addresses some of those challenges.