Experiments with OVAL : a radically tailorable tool for cooperative work

"Appeared in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '92), Toronto, Ontario, Canada, November 1992"--P. [1].Includes bibliographical references (p. 18-20).Supported by Digital Equipment Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Boeing, Information Resources, Inc., Electronic Data Systems, Apple Computer Company, and the corporate members of the MIT International Financial Services Research Center. Supported by the National Science Foundation. IRI-8903034Thomas W. Malone, Kum-Yew Lai, and Christopher Fry

Object lens : a 'spreadsheet' for cooperative work

"September 1988."Includes bibliographical references (p. 22-24).Supported by American Express Company, Arthur Young and Company, British Petroleum Company, p.l.c., BellSouth Corporation, CIGNA Corporation, Digital Equipment Corporation, Eastman Kodak Company, General Motors Corporation, International Computers Ltd., MCI Communications Corporation, United States Army, and the United States Internal Revenue Service.Kum-Yew Lai, Thomas W. Malone, Keh-Chiang Yu

How do experienced Information Lens users use rules?

"October 1988."Includes bibliographical references (p. 12).Wendy E. Mackay ... [et. al.]

Design of a Structured Decision Process Support System for Asynchronous Groups

Organizational work is increasingly conducted by geographically dispersed individuals working as groups. Geographic dispersion and simultaneous membership in multiple groups often make it impractical to bring decision groups together for traditional, face-to-face meetings. Therefore, group decisions need to be carried out by physically and temporally dispersed asynchronousgroups. This paper describes the development of computer support for asynchronous groups performing a specific task type. Group decision support systems have focused on computer support for face-to-face decision groups and have been the subject of extensive research (e.g., Jessup and Valacich, 1993). In contrast, research on physically and temporally dispersed groups has been limited (e.g., Turoff, et al., 1993). To developeffective computer support for asynchronous groups we apply a system analysis and design approach: First, we employ a Requirements Analysis and then we proceed to develop an appropriate Systems Design to meet the identified requirements. Our ultimate goalis to test the effectiveness of the system under conditions of experimental control

Delegation of Tasks and Dissemination of Information in Organizations: Restructuring Internet E-Mail for Doing Things

In this paper we consider e-mail as a task management tool. We present and discuss the results of an explorative study of task management in a user’s daily electronic life. Our general goal is to restructure the domain of Internet e-mail. The purpose is to make it even more suitable for cooperative, message-based communication in both virtual and real organizations. Specifically, we aim to design a control mechanism to support the identification and delegation of tasks and dissemination of information to users in an organization employing e-mail. The users are characterized by high mail traffic and a need to manage e-mail in different organizational roles. A tentative solution and a prototype are briefly described, using a previously developed conceptual model of information management in e-mail as a starting point

New Technologies for Space Avionics, 1993

The report reviews a 1993 effort that investigated issues associated with the development of requirements, with the practice of concurrent engineering and with rapid prototyping, in the development of a next-generation Reaction Jet Drive Controller. This report details lessons learned, the current status of the prototype, and suggestions for future work. The report concludes with a discussion of the vision of future avionics architectures based on the principles associated with open architectures and integrated vehicle health management

Appendix C: Rapid development approaches for system engineering and design

Conventional system architectures, development processes, and tool environments often produce systems which exceed cost expectations and are obsolete before they are fielded. This paper explores some of the reasons for this and provides recommendations for how we can do better. These recommendations are based on DoD and NASA system developments and on our exploration and development of system/software engineering tools

Appendix B: Rapid development approaches for system engineering and design

Conventional processes often produce systems which are obsolete before they are fielded. This paper explores some of the reasons for this, and provides a vision of how we can do better. This vision is based on our explorations in improved processes and system/software engineering tools

Collaborative software agents support for the texpros document management system

This dissertation investigates the use of active rules that are embedded in markup documents. Active rules are used in a markup representation by integrating Collaborative Software Agents with TEXPROS (abbreviation for TEXt PROcessing System) [Liu and Ng 1996] to create a powerful distributed document management system. Such markup documents with embedded active rules are called Active Documents. For fast retrieval purposes, when we need to generate a customized Internet folder organization, we first define the Folder Organization Query Language (FO-QL) to solve data categorization problems. FO-QL defines the folder organization query process that automatically retrieves links of documents deposited into folders and then constructs a folder organization in either a centralized document repository or multiple distributed document repositories. Traditional documents are stored as static data that do not provide any dynamic capabilities for accessing or interacting with the document environment. The dynamic and distributed nature of both markup data and markup rules do not merely respond to requests for information, but intelligently anticipate, adapt, and actively seek ways to support the computing processes. This outcome feature conquers the static nature of the traditional documents. An Office Automation Definition Language (OADL) with active rules is defined for constructing the TEXPROS \u27s dual modeling approach and workflow events representation. Active Documents are such agent-supported OADL documents. With embedded rules and self-describing data features, Active Documents provide capability of collaborative interactions with software agents. Data transformation and data integration are both data processing problems but little research has focused on the markup documents to generate a versatile folder organization. Some of the research merely provides manual browsing in a document repository to find the right document. This browsing is time consuming and unrealistic, especially in multiple document repositories. With FO-QL, one can create a customized folder organization on demand

How can groups communicate when they use different languages? : translating between partially shared type heirarchies

Includes bibliographical references (p. 1-3, second group).Supported in part by DARPA, the National Science Foundation, Wang Laboratories, Inc., Xerox Corporation, General Motors, and Bankers Trust Company.Jintae Lee, Thomas W. Malone