Event Maps: A Collaborative Calendaring System for Navigating Large-Scale Events

Event Maps is a novel, rich and interactive web-based system targeted at improving the experience of attending and organizing large, multi-track conferences. Through its zoomable Tabular Timeline, users can navigate the conference schedule, seamlessly moving between global and local views. Event Maps enables contextual asynchronous collaboration before, during, and after the conference. Organizers can easily create or import conference schedules via a backend interface, and also use the provided analytic toolkits to get insights from visiting patterns and statistics. Event Maps has gone through three major rounds of iterative design, including a deployment at an intra-company conference. This paper describes in detail the design and evolution of Event Maps, including the quantitative and qualitative feedback from our real world deployment and the results of a comparative study with a traditional web-based conference calendar.

By: Jingtao Wang; Danny Soroker; Chandra Narayanaswami

Published in: RC24971 in 2009

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