An Analysis of Cross-Document Linking Mechanisms

IEEE Pervasive Computing, 2000

2008

Nowadays a user's personal information space is fragmented into multiple repositories on their local machine as well as on remote servers. In order to enable later access to resources managed within such a cross-media information space, information has to be organised in a format that can be processed by automatic retrieval processes. We propose a general framework for personal information management based on extending a cross-media link server with supplemental metadata functionality. In addition to user generated information, our solution automatically derives metadata for classifying and associating resources based on direct interaction with the information space. Resources and metadata can be integrated by referencing external resources or information may be managed directly by the framework. The presented cross-media information management solution is not limited to a fixed set of predefined resources and can be extended based on a resource plug-in mechanism.

"While there have been dramatic increases in the use of digital technologies for information storage, processing and delivery over the last twenty years, the affordances of paper have ensured its retention as a key information medium. Despite predictions of the paperless office, paper is ever more present in our daily work as reflected by the continuously increasing worldwide paper consumption. Many researchers have argued for the retention of paper as an information resource and its integration into cross-media environments as opposed to its replacement. This has resulted in a wide variety of projects and technological developments for digitally augmented paper documents over the past decade. However, the majority of the realised projects focus on technical advances in terms of hardware but pay less attention to the very fundamental information integration and cross-media information management issues. Our information-centric approach for a tight integration of paper and digital information is based on extending an object-oriented database management system with functionality for cross-media information management. The resulting iServer platform introduces fundamental link concepts at an abstract level. The iServer’s core link management functionality is available across different multimedia resources. Only the media-specific portion of these general concepts, for example the specification of a link’s source anchor, has to be implemented in the form of a plug-in to support new resource types. This resource plug-in mechanism results in a flexible and extensible system where new types of digital as well as physical resources can easily be integrated and, more importantly, cross-linked to the growing set of supported multimedia resources. In addition to the associative linking of information, our solution allows for the integration of semantic metadata and supports multiple classification of information units. iServer can, not only link between various static information entities, but also link to active content and this has proven to be very effective in enabling more complex interaction design. As part of the European project Paper++, under the Disappearing Computer Programme, an iServer plug-in for interactive paper has been implemented to fully integrate paper and digital media, thereby gaining the best of the physical and the digital worlds. It not only supports linking from physical paper to digital information, but also enables links from digital content to physical paper or even paper to paper links. This multi-mode user interface results in highly interactive systems where users can easily switch back and forth between paper and digital information. The definition of an abstract input device interface further provides flexibility for supporting emerging technologies for paper link definition in addition to the hardware solutions for paper link definition and activation that were developed within the Paper++ project. We introduce different approaches for cross-media information authoring where information is either compiled by established publishers with an expertise in a specific domain or by individuals who produce their own cross-media information environments. Preauthored information can be combined with personally aggregated information. A distributed peer-to-peer version of the iServer platform supports collaborative authoring and the sharing of link knowledge within a community of users. The associations between different types of resources as well as other application-specific information can be visualised on different output channels. Universal access to the iServer’s information space is granted using the eXtensible Information Management Architecture (XIMA), our publishing platform for multi-channel access. Our fundamental concepts for interactive paper and cross-media information management have been designed independently of particular hardware solutions and modes of interaction which enables the iServer platform to easily adapt to both new technologies and applications. Finally, the information infrastructure that we have developed has great potential as an experimental platform for the investigation of emerging multimedia resources in general and interactive paper with its possible applications in particular."

This paper covers the evolution of the concept of Usage Tracking to automatically link digital objects such as documents. Extensive ethnographic studies of information work have revealed that establishing and maintaining rela-tionships – between documents, between artifacts and be-tween people – is at the core of information work. Focusing on just one aspect of this challenge, we looked for practical ways of relating digital documents. Leveraging the fieldwork, we designed a mechanism that captures the user's activity across documents and reinterprets it as links between these documents. We implemented the mechanism as a running prototype to assess the feasibility of the concept, and in general gauge the opportunities to make better use of usage data – which are mostly gets ignored in today's computing platforms. Object to object relation building through usage data has three important advantages over most existing methods for automatically establishing relations: first, it ...

Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries, 2003

Open linking has become the accepted standard in the information industry today. With new resource linking products and solutions arriving on the scene daily, vendor claims require careful scrutiny regarding initial setup and ongoing maintenance. This paper examines the development of linking technologies at Ovid, along with some of the issues confronting product developers who promise full integration of information resources through linking.

… of the 4th ACM/IEEE-CS …, 2004

Creating, maintaining, or using a digital library requires the manipulation of digital documents. Information workspaces provide a visual representation allowing users to collect, organize, annotate, and author information. The Visual Knowledge Builder (VKB) helps users access, collect, annotate, and combine materials from digital libraries and other sources into a personal information workspace. VKB has been enhanced to include direct search interfaces for NSDL and Google. Users create a visualization of search results while selecting and organizing materials for their current activity. Additionally, metadata applicators have been added to VKB. This interface allows the rapid addition of metadata to documents and aids the user in the extraction of existing metadata for application to other documents. A study was performed to compare the selection and organization of documents in VKB to the commonly used tools of a Web browser and a word processor. This study shows the value of visual workspaces for such effort but points to the need for subdocument level objects, ephemeral visualizations, and support for moving from visual representations to metadata.

2014

Digital documents often do not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly linked to parts of other documents. Nevertheless, most existing document formats only support links to web resources but not to parts of third-party documents. An open cross-document link service should address the multitude of existing document formats and be extensible to support emerging document formats and models. We present an architecture and prototype of an open cross-document link service and browser that is based on the RSL hypermedia metamodel. A main contribution is the specification and development of a visual plug-in solution that enables the integration of new document formats without requiring changes to the cross-document browser's main user interface component. The presented visual plug-in mechanism makes use of the Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi) specification for modularisation and plug-in extensibility and has been validated by developing data as well as visual plug-ins for a number of existing document formats.

2014

Information fragmentation is a well-known issue in personal information management (PIM). In order to overcome this problem, various PIM solutions have focussed on linking documents via semantic relationships. More recently, task-centered information management (TIM) has been introduced as an alternative PIM paradigm. While these two paradigms have their strengths and weaknesses, we aim for a new PIM system design approach to achieve better synergies with human memory. We further envision a cross-media solution where physical information is integrated with a user's digital personal information space. We present the Object-Concept-Context (OC2) conceptual framework for context-aware personal cross-media information management combining the best of the two existing PIM paradigms and integrating the most relevant features of the human memory. Further, we outline how the OC2 framework has been implemented based on a domain-specific application of the Resource-Selector-Link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel.

2019

The efficient management and retrieval of information via dedicated devices and data structures has been investigated since the early days of Vannevar Bush's seminal article As We May Think introducing the Memex. However, nowadays information is usually fragmented across different media types, devices as well as digital and physical environments, and we are often struggling to retrieve specific information. We discuss three main issues to be addressed when developing solutions for managing information in these co-called cross-media information spaces. First, we have a look at an extensible cross-media linking solution based on the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel where information can be integrated across applications, devices as well as digital and physical information environments. We then outline some of the limitations of existing digital document formats which are often just a simulation of paper documents and their affordances on desktop computers, and discuss more flexible document representations for cross-media information spaces. Further, new forms of human-information interaction and cross-media user interfaces—including some recent work on dynamic data physicalisation—are discussed. A number of research artefacts are used to illustrate different aspects of the presented data-centric approach for cross-media information spaces and architectures. Last but not least, we provide an outlook on how the embedding of the presented concepts at the level of an operating system might ultimately lead to new possibilities for cross-media information management and innovative forms of human-information interaction.

Proceedings of the Second Asian …, 1999