Catalysing the development of a conference workspace

Modern Web introduces new means to support conference information retrieval and, moreover, social tools that enable conference delegates to actively contribute to a conference. Simultaneously, existing case studies show that collecting explicitly represented conference data is possible in real-life settings. From these grounds, methods and tools of component-based information visualisation can be used to process conference data, firstly, in order to create visualisations of the conference data, and, secondly, to produce data for populating interactive conference tools. We claim that when coupled with usage tracking and analysis, the automated creation of visualisations and population data can catalyse the iterative development of a conference workspace. In this article, we present case OPAALS 2008 where formal conference data was successfully harvested and utilised to partly automate the creation workflow of the conference workspace. Moreover, we introduce the methods that were used to gain insight on the dynamics of the workspace usage.