iMonitor: Architecture of Web-based Collaborative Visual Analytics System for Bridge Management

Bridge management is a collaborative work that requires inputs and decisions from multiple personals and hierarchies. The proper and effective circulation of information plays an important role in prioritizing the bridge maintenance decisions. While traditional bridge management systems can provide information for individual bridge manager, those systems are not designed to effectively facilitate the essential collaborations that are required in managing bridges. In this paper, the authors propose architecture of web-based collaborative visual analytics system, iMonitor. Based on the authors nationwide survey and interviews with bridge managers, the authors designed iMonitor to support information analysis on both individual level and collaboration level. For individual bridge managers, iMonitor provides highly customizable interfaces that can enables interactive exploration, information correlation, and domain-oriented data analysis. For groups of collaborators, iMonitor introduce methods to capture and annotate findings, prepare evidence, and collaboratively create and share bridge maintenance reports. When demoed to bridge managers of North Carolina Department of Transportations, the authors validated that our system can provide bridge managers with the essential feature of performing in-depth bridge analysis that are in accordance to their typical workflow. The authors further plan to move iMonitor from internal testing to real-world environments.