Introduction
For several years, the World Wide Web offers an increasing availability of environmental information in the form of map services, weather portals, or even traffic information pages. With the widespread use of such services for everyday decision-making, a custom orchestration and efficient visualization of the available data is needed. Some example issues with the manual information retrieval are that individual services seldom cover all needed data for specific situations, that the data is presented in an manner unsuitable to the end user, an that information from different vendors can contradict each other.
In the PESCaDO project, a visual analytics system was designed on the basis of current research. It takes advantage of the different data sources on the web in order to create a semi-automatic and interactive decision support and service orchestration. The information required to answer an individual problem of a user is inferred based on both, their personal background, e.g. language, age or health condition, as well as the current context, e.g. location and time of day the request was composed. The relevant data sources are then found, evaluated and the required data structured is accessed. Based on the preferences of the user, interactive visualizations are ultimately produced, which present the data in a combined and problem-oriented way. Uncertainties, contradictions and shortcomings in the available data sets are also represented visually, allowing the user to react in the process of decision-making accordingly.
Funding and Cooperation
The PESCaDO project duration was 3 years and it was funded by the EU program: Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in FP7 starting from January 2010. There were 7 partners involved in the project.