Proceedings of the ECSCW'95 Workshop on the Role of Version Control in CSCW Applications

The workshop entitled "The Role of Version Control in Computer Supported Cooperative Work Applications" was held on September 10, 1995 in Stockholm, Sweden in conjunction with the ECSCW'95 conference. Version control, the ability to manage relationships between successive instances of artifacts, organize those instances into meaningful structures, and support navigation and other operations on those structures, is an important problem in CSCW applications. It has long been recognized as a critical issue for inherently cooperative tasks such as software engineering, technical documentation, and authoring. The primary challenge for versioning in these areas is to support opportunistic, open-ended design processes requiring the preservation of historical perspectives in the design process, the reuse of previous designs, and the exploitation of alternative designs. The primary goal of this workshop was to bring together a diverse group of individuals interested in examining the role of versioning in Computer Supported Cooperative Work. Participation was encouraged from members of the research community currently investigating the versioning process in CSCW as well as application designers and developers who are familiar with the real-world requirements for versioning in CSCW. Both groups were represented at the workshop resulting in an exchange of ideas and information that helped to familiarize developers with the most recent research results in the area, and to provide researchers with an updated view of the needs and challenges faced by application developers. In preparing for this workshop, the organizers were able to build upon the results of their previous one entitled "The Workshop on Versioning in Hypertext" held in conjunction with the ECHT'94 conference. The following section of this report contains a summary in which the workshop organizers report the major results of the workshop. The summary is followed by a section that contains the position papers that were accepted to the workshop. The position papers provide more detailed information describing recent research efforts of the workshop participants as well as current challenges that are being encountered in the development of CSCW applications. A list of workshop participants is provided at the end of the report. The organizers would like to thank all of the participants for their contributions which were, of course, vital to the success of the workshop. We would also like to thank the ECSCW'95 conference organizers for providing a forum in which this workshop was possible

Combining knowledge mapping and videoconferencing for open sensemaking communities

The Open Educational Resources (OER) movement has been growing rapidly, opening up new opportunities for widening participation (Willinsky, 2006). OpenLearn is an OER pilot project developed by the UK Open University (OU) [http://www.open.ac.uk/openlearn], and launched in October 2006, supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. OpenLearn has published 3371 hours in the LearningSPace and 5194 in the LabSpace of OERs designed specifically for distance learning (the OU’s core business), and covers a range of subjects from arts and history to science and nature. There are more than 300 units at all study levels from access to higher education, graduation and postgraduation. Our current work is to investigate how these tools can be used to foster open sensemaking communities (Buckingham Shum, 2005) around the OERs, that is, the interpretative work that must take place around any resource for learning to take place. How can we support this critical activity in an OER context when learners must find and engage with peers themselves, if they do not wish to study alone? This paper introduces the e-learning environment that has been developed after the first year of OpenLearn, focusing on the uses made of two sensemaking support tools, Compendium for knowledge mapping, and FlashMeeting for videoconferencing

Opening up Magpie via semantic services

Magpie is a suite of tools supporting a ‘zero-cost’ approach to semantic web browsing: it avoids the need for manual annotation by automatically associating an ontology-based semantic layer to web resources. An important aspect of Magpie, which differentiates it from superficially similar hypermedia systems, is that the association between items on a web page and semantic concepts is not merely a mechanism for dynamic linking, but it is the enabling condition for locating services and making them available to a user. These services can be manually activated by a user (pull services), or opportunistically triggered when the appropriate web entities are encountered during a browsing session (push services). In this paper we analyze Magpie from the perspective of building semantic web applications and we note that earlier implementations did not fulfill the criterion of “open as to services”, which is a key aspect of the emerging semantic web. For this reason, in the past twelve months we have carried out a radical redesign of Magpie, resulting in a novel architecture, which is open both with respect to ontologies and semantic web services. This new architecture goes beyond the idea of merely providing support for semantic web browsing and can be seen as a software framework for designing and implementing semantic web applications

Hypermedia support for argumentation-based rationale: 15 years on from gIBIS and QOC

Having developed, used and evaluated some of the early IBIS-based approaches to design rationale (DR) such as gIBIS and QOC in the late 1980s/mid-1990s, we describe the subsequent evolution of the argumentation-based paradigm through software support, and perspectives drawn from modeling and meeting facilitation. Particular attention is given to the challenge of negotiating the overheads of capturing this form of rationale. Our approach has maintained a strong emphasis on keeping the representational scheme as simple as possible to enable real time meeting mediation and capture, attending explicitly to the skills required to use the approach well, particularly for the sort of participatory, multi-stakeholder requirements analysis demanded by many design problems. However, we can then specialize the notation and the way in which the tool is used in the service of specific methodologies, supported by a customizable hypermedia environment, and interoperable with other software tools. After presenting this approach, called Compendium, we present examples to illustrate the capabilities for support security argumentation in requirements engineering, template driven modeling for document generation, and IBIS-based indexing of and navigation around video records of meetings

Asynchronously Replicated Shared Workspaces for a Multi-Media Annotation Service over Internet

This paper describes a world wide collaboration system through multimedia Post-its (user generated annotations). DIANE is a service to create multimedia annotations to every application output on the computer, as well as to existing multimedia annotations. Users collaborate by registering multimedia documents and user generated annotation in shared workspaces. However, DIANE only allows effective participation in a shared workspace over a high performance network (ATM, fast Ethernet) since it deals with large multimedia object. When only slow or unreliable connections are available between a DIANE terminal and server, useful work becomes impossible. To overcome these restrictions we need to replicate DIANE servers so that users do not suffer degradation in the quality of service. We use the asynchronous replication service ODIN to replicate the shared workspaces to every interested site in a transparent way to users. ODIN provides a cost-effective object replication by building a dynamic virtual network over Internet. The topology of this virtual network optimizes the use of network resources while it satisfies the changing requirements of the users

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

A collaborative-project memory tool for participatory planning

Technology is more and more providing planners and designer with tools and methods to collect and communicate spatial data and assist spatial analysis. When we think about new technologies supporting planning we mainly think about GIS, urban modelling, simulation models and virtual reality. But many other challenges to the planning practice need for tools to support and improve planning activities. In this paper we discuss the need of new tools to support knowledge representation and knowledge sharing in participatory planning processes. The paper describes the use of a hypermedia and sensemaking tool (Compendium) to structure the knowledge produced in a real participatory planning process. In the present application Compendium has been used not for real-time capturing but for a post-hoc analysis of a real participatory planning experience. Compendium has been used to represent and reconstruct the group memory of consultation meetings in order to allow both the planning team and the citizens to navigate into the contents of those meetings. Moreover the paper describes the main features and potential of the use of Compendium in Participatory Planning domain, and it describes the results of the group memory reconstruction. Finally the case study opens reflections on the need of new planning technologies supporting participatory knowledge generation, representation and management

Geoscience after IT: Part L. Adjusting the emerging information system to new technology

Coherent development depends on following widely used standards that respect our vast legacy of existing entries in the geoscience record. Middleware ensures that we see a coherent view from our desktops of diverse sources of information. Developments specific to managing the written word, map content, and structured data come together in shared metadata linking topics and information types