Many modern organizations make use of document collections as an important element of their businesses. They would like to get as much value as possible from the information stored in these collections. However, current tools are often oriented to finding and presenting individual documents; finding desired information can require examining many individual items, and users find little support for making sense of topics discussed in multiple documents, and little support for sharing their understanding with other users. This paper reports on the Document Interactions project, which takes a story-based approach to making sense of documents. It combines a tool for creating stories from documents and images, with a virtual reality system in which users can present and discuss these stories. We also report on two studies: an ethnographic study of story use in a history museum and a study in which museum staff evaluated our tools.

In an enterprise environment, business information, such as project proposals and product discussions, is dynamic and often embedded in documents and document activities (e.g, emails, Web pages and office documents). Because this information is essential to business processes, corporate employees need an effective means to retrieve it. Some commercial products, including Google Desktop, provide keyword searches for finding some of this information. However, this approach is not always effective as successful keyword searches can be difficult to construct, and even the best queries may fail to find some important materials. In this paper, we present TASTE (Temporal Activities and Story TElling), an interactive visual analytics system that enhances the enterprise employee's capabilities in searching and sharing diverse and dynamic business information. Taste was designed, after interviews with corporate employees, to follow their information retrieval cues and help them manage, review and share the business information embedded in their document activities. Results of our lab and field studies validate that Taste provides employees the confidence and necessary features to more efficiently and effectively retrieve business information from their documents and activities.

Any new system must provide significant advantages to users for them to adopt it over their existing practices. In this paper, we discuss changes made over the last two years of use of the UpLib personal digital library system, to provide those advantages in the realm of personal document management. These changes are concentrated in the document acquisition phase, where document analysis is performed and databases of document information are prepared. However, some changes have been made in the areas of collection management, and general document usage, primarily to provide better interfaces to the improved document projections.

Describes the origins, design, and implementation of a new Java Swing toolkit widget called ReadUp, which provides support for reading and annotating page images in a digital library application, and discusses briefly how it is being used.

Abstract: Digital libraries are increasingly based on digital page images, but techniques for constructing usable versions of these page images are largely folklore. This paper documents some issues encountered in creating various kinds of renderings of page images for the UpLib digital library system, and suggests approaches for each, based on both problem analysis and user feedback. Several factors important in determining useful sizes for small visual representations of the documents, called document icons, are discussed; one algorithm, called log-area, seems most effective.

Describes the metadata sharing and extension sharing systems used with UpLib.

Abstract: We describe the design and use of a personal digital library system, UpLib. The system consists of a full-text indexed repository accessed through an active agent via a Web interface. It is suitable for personal collections comprising tens of thousands of documents (including papers, books, photos, receipts, email, etc.), and provides for ease of document entry and access as well as high levels of security and privacy. Unlike many other systems of the sort, user access to the document collection is assured even if the UpLib system is unavailable. It is "universal" in the sense that documents are canonically represented as projections into the text and image domains, and uses a predominantly visual user interface based on page images. UpLib can thus handle any document format which can be rendered as pages. Provision is made for alternative representations existing alongside the text-domain and image-domain representation, either stored or generated on demand. The system is highly extensible through user scripting, and is intended to be used as a platform for further work in document engineering. UpLib is assembled largely from open-source components (the current exception being the OCR engine, which is proprietary).

Describes the Ubitext process for decomposition of page image documents into reflowable image streams.

Abstract: We report on the results of the Protocol Design Group of the W3C's HTTP "Next Generation" Activity. The group produced and measured a prototype that shows it is possible, largely using familiar engineering principles, to make simultaneous improvements in the following problem areas of HTTP/1.1: (1) the layering of other application protocols over HTTP, (2) modularity and extensibility, (3) networking performance and fairness, (4) the rigid binding between identifiers and protocol stacks, and (5) the opacity of layered traffic to firewalls. The prototype also suggests that these can be done in a way that may lead to unifying the web with related middleware systems such as COM, CORBA, and Java RMI.

Reference manual for ILU, an inter-language unification system. The system provides interfaces between modules written in different languages, either in a single address space or in multiple address spaces. Supports modules written in C, C++, Common Lisp, Java, Python, and Scheme, on Windows, Unix, or Mac systems.

Describes the architecture and type system designed for the W3C HTTP-ng experimental testbed.

Describes the highly efficient wire protocol developed for the W3C HTTP-NG experiment.

Describes the metadata sharing and extension sharing systems used with UpLib.

Abstract: This paper presents a confederation of tools, called Coral, that combine to support the real-time capture of and subsequent access to informal collaborative activities. The tools provide the means to initiate digital multimedia recordings, a variety of methods to index those recordings, and ways to retrieve the indexed material in other settings. The current system emerged from a convergence of the WhereWereWe multimedia work, the Tivoli LiveBoard application, and the Inter-Language Unification distributed-object programming infrastructure. We are working with a specific user community and application domain, which has helped us shape a particular, demonstrably useful, configuration of tools and to get extensive real-world experience with them. This domain involves frequent discussion and decision-making meetings and later access of the captured records of those meetings to produce accurate documentation. Several aspects of Coral--the application tools, the architecture of the confederation, and the multimedia infrastructure--are described.