Annotation persistence over dynamic documents

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 212-216).Annotations, as a routine practice of actively engaging with reading materials, are heavily used in the paper world to augment the usefulness of documents. By annotation, we include a large variety of creative manipulations by which the otherwise passive reader becomes actively involved in a document. Annotations in digital form possess many benefits paper annotations do not enjoy, such as annotation searching, annotation multi- referencing, and annotation sharing. The digital form also introduces challenges to the process of annotation. This study looks at one of them, annotation persistence over dynamic documents. With the development of annotation software, users now have the opportunity to annotate documents which they don't own, or to which they don't have write permission. In annotation software, annotations are normally created and saved independently of the document. The owners of the documents being annotated may have no knowledge of the fact that third parties are annotating their documents' contents. When document contents are modified, annotation software faces a difficult situation where annotations need to be reattached. Reattaching annotations in a revised version of a document is a crucial component in annotation system design. Annotation persistence over document versions is a complicated and challenging problem, as documents can go through various changes between versions. In this thesis, we treat annotation persistence over dynamic documents as a specialized information retrieval problem. We then design a scheme to reposition annotations between versions by three mechanisms: the meta-structure information match, the keywords match, and content semantics match.(cont.) Content semantics matching is the determining factor in our annotation persistence scheme design. Latent Semantic Analysis, an innovative information retrieval model, is used to extract and compare document semantics. Two editions of an introductory computer science textbook are used to evaluate the annotation persistence scheme proposed in this study. The evaluation provides substantial evidence that the annotation persistence scheme proposed in this thesis is able to make the right decisions on repositioning annotations based on their degree of modifications, i.e. to reattach annotations if modifications are light, and to orphan annotations if modifications are heavy.by Shaomin Wang.Ph.D

Web Annotation Systems: A Literature Review and Case Study

Web annotation has been a popular research topic since the appearance of Internet and its supplementary technologies. This paper provides a literature review in the related research areas, and introduces some currently available web annotation systems with the comparison of these systems in seven aspects. In addition, this paper incorporates a description of the ongoing NeoNote project, and identifies limitations of this study for future work

Spatially Aware Computing for Natural Interaction

Spatial information refers to the location of an object in a physical or digital world. Besides, it also includes the relative position of an object related to other objects around it. In this dissertation, three systems are designed and developed. All of them apply spatial information in different fields. The ultimate goal is to increase the user friendliness and efficiency in those applications by utilizing spatial information. The first system is a novel Web page data extraction application, which takes advantage of 2D spatial information to discover structured records from a Web page. The extracted information is useful to re-organize the layout of a Web page to fit mobile browsing. The second application utilizes the 3D spatial information of a mobile device within a large paper-based workspace to implement interactive paper that combines the merits of paper documents and mobile devices. This application can overlay digital information on top of a paper document based on the location of a mobile device within a workspace. The third application further integrates 3D space information with sound detection to realize an automatic camera management system. This application automatically controls multiple cameras in a conference room, and creates an engaging video by intelligently switching camera shots among meeting participants based on their activities. Evaluations have been made on all three applications, and the results are promising. In summary, this dissertation comprehensively explores the usage of spatial information in various applications to improve the usability

Cognitive Activity Support Tools: Design of the Visual Interface

This dissertation is broadly concerned with interactive computational tools that support the performance of complex cognitive activities, examples of which are analytical reasoning, decision making, problem solving, sense making, forecasting, and learning. Examples of tools that support such activities are visualization-based tools in the areas of: education, information visualization, personal information management, statistics, and health informatics. Such tools enable access to information and data and, through interaction, enable a human-information discourse. In a more specific sense, this dissertation is concerned with the design of the visual interface of these tools. This dissertation presents a large and comprehensive theoretical framework to support research and design. Issues treated herein include interaction design and patterns of interaction for cognitive and epistemic support; analysis of the essential properties of interactive visual representations and their influences on cognitive and perceptual processes; an analysis of the structural components of interaction and how different operational forms of interaction components affect the performance of cognitive activities; an examination of how the information-processing load should be distributed between humans and tools during the performance of complex cognitive activities; and a categorization of common visualizations according to their structure and function, and a discussion of the cognitive utility of each category. This dissertation also includes a chapter that describes the design of a cognitive activity support tool, as guided by the theoretical contributions that comprise the rest of the dissertation. Those that may find this dissertation useful include researchers and practitioners in the areas of data and information visualization, visual analytics, medical and health informatics, data science, journalism, educational technology, and digital games

Three-tier feature-based collaborative browsing for computer telephony integration.

Ho Ho-ching.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-107).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Abstract --- p.iAcknowledgment --- p.viChapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1. --- Introduction to PBX based Call Center --- p.1Chapter 1.2. --- The Scenarios --- p.2Chapter 1.3. --- Thesis Overview --- p.5Chapter 2. --- Features of Collaborative Browsing --- p.8Chapter 2.1. --- Feature Synchronization vs Bitmap Screen Transfer --- p.8Chapter 2.2. --- Basic Collaborative Features of the Collaborative Browser --- p.9Chapter 2.2.1. --- Web Page Pushing --- p.10Chapter 2.2.2. --- Screen Widget Synchronization --- p.11Chapter 2.2.3. --- Tele-pointing and Shared Whiteboard --- p.12Chapter 2.3. --- Collaborative Form Manipulation --- p.13Chapter 2.3.1. --- Importance of Electronic Form Collaboration --- p.13Chapter 2.3.2. --- Basic Support for Form Collaboration ´ؤ´ؤData Synchronization --- p.14Chapter 2.3.3. --- Existence of Form Complexity ´ؤForm Data Dependency --- p.75Chapter 2.3.4. --- Hinting --- p.17Chapter 2.4. --- Collaborative IVR --- p.23Chapter 2.4.1. --- Traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Service --- p.23Chapter 2.4.2. --- Abstraction ´ؤCorrelating Form Interaction Mechansim with IVR --- p.25Chapter 2.4.3 --- Collaborative IVR by Form Interaction Mechanism --- p.27Chapter 3. --- Software Architecture --- p.33Chapter 3.1. --- The Three-Tier Architecture --- p.33Chapter 3.2. --- The Collaboration Mechanism for Collaborative Browser --- p.37Chapter 3.2.1. --- Session Initialization/Termination --- p.37Chapter 3.2.2. --- Data Flow of the Basic Collaboration Features --- p.39Chapter 3.2.3. --- Control Mechanism --- p.40Chapter 3.2.4. --- The Hinting Mechanism for Collaborative Form Manipulation --- p.43Chapter 3.3. --- The Collaboration Mechanism for Collaborative IVR --- p.45Chapter 4. --- Implementation --- p.51Chapter 4.1. --- Shareable Document Object Architecture for Collaboration --- p.51Chapter 4.1.1. --- Document Object Architecture --- p.51Chapter 4.1.2. --- Generalizing to Shareable Document Object Architecture --- p.53Chapter 4.2. --- Whiteboard Mechanism --- p.55Chapter 4.3. --- Packet Data Unit for Communication --- p.57Chapter 4.4. --- Bridging Different Software Components --- p.60Chapter 4.5. --- Hinting Mechanism for Collaborative Form Manipulation --- p.63Chapter 4.5.1. --- Relating Form Fields to Table Fields --- p.63Chapter 4.5.2. --- Hinting by the Hinting Tables --- p.69Chapter 4.6. --- Collaborative IVR --- p.73Chapter 4.6.1. --- Using Mediator for Collaborative IVR --- p.73Chapter 4.6.2. --- Concept of Telephone Form --- p.74Chapter 4.6.3. --- Hinting for Collaborative IVR --- p.78Chapter 4.7. --- System Integration --- p.81Chapter 5. --- Performance Evaluation and Experiment Results --- p.84Chapter 5.1. --- Optimizing the Transmission Methodology --- p.84Chapter 5.2. --- Browser Responsiveness Study --- p.86Chapter 5.2.1. --- Experiment Details --- p.86Chapter 5.2.2. --- The Assumptions --- p.89Chapter 5.2.3. --- Experiment Results and Analysis --- p.90Chapter 5.3. --- Bandwidth Consumption --- p.94Chapter 6. --- Conclusions --- p.97Appendix A 一 Government Profit Tax Return Form --- p.101Appendix B ´ؤ A Phone Banking IVR Service Tree --- p.103Bibliography --- p.10

A Probabilistic Framework for Information Modelling and Retrieval Based on User Annotations on Digital Objects

Annotations are a means to make critical remarks, to explain and comment things, to add notes and give opinions, and to relate objects. Nowadays, they can be found in digital libraries and collaboratories, for example as a building block for scientific discussion on the one hand or as private notes on the other. We further find them in product reviews, scientific databases and many "Web 2.0" applications; even well-established concepts like emails can be regarded as annotations in a certain sense. Digital annotations can be (textual) comments, markings (i.e. highlighted parts) and references to other documents or document parts. Since annotations convey information which is potentially important to satisfy a user's information need, this thesis tries to answer the question of how to exploit annotations for information retrieval. It gives a first answer to the question if retrieval effectiveness can be improved with annotations. A survey of the "annotation universe" reveals some facets of annotations; for example, they can be content level annotations (extending the content of the annotation object) or meta level ones (saying something about the annotated object). Besides the annotations themselves, other objects created during the process of annotation can be interesting for retrieval, these being the annotated fragments. These objects are integrated into an object-oriented model comprising digital objects such as structured documents and annotations as well as fragments. In this model, the different relationships among the various objects are reflected. From this model, the basic data structure for annotation-based retrieval, the structured annotation hypertext, is derived. In order to thoroughly exploit the information contained in structured annotation hypertexts, a probabilistic, object-oriented logical framework called POLAR is introduced. In POLAR, structured annotation hypertexts can be modelled by means of probabilistic propositions and four-valued logics. POLAR allows for specifying several relationships among annotations and annotated (sub)parts or fragments. Queries can be posed to extract the knowledge contained in structured annotation hypertexts. POLAR supports annotation-based retrieval, i.e. document and discussion search, by applying an augmentation strategy (knowledge augmentation, propagating propositions from subcontexts like annotations, or relevance augmentation, where retrieval status values are propagated) in conjunction with probabilistic inference, where P(d -> q), the probability that a document d implies a query q, is estimated. POLAR's semantics is based on possible worlds and accessibility relations. It is implemented on top of four-valued probabilistic Datalog. POLAR's core retrieval functionality, knowledge augmentation with probabilistic inference, is evaluated for discussion and document search. The experiments show that all relevant POLAR objects, merged annotation targets, fragments and content annotations, are able to increase retrieval effectiveness when used as a context for discussion or document search. Additional experiments reveal that we can determine the polarity of annotations with an accuracy of around 80%