Exploiting Serendipity Amongst Users To Provide Support For Hypertext Navigation Gary Hill Gerard Hutchings Multicosm Ltd Parallel Applications Centre 2 Venture Road +44 1703 760834 Southampton
[email protected] SO16 7NP, UK +44 1703 767678
[email protected]
Roger James Glaxo Wellcome R&D Ltd +44 181 966 4476
[email protected]
ABSTRACT
The aim of the MEMOIR Project is to demonstrate the applicability and integration of advanced, distributed multimedia information systems to support the management of, and access to, diverse sources of technical information in large R&D-based corporations. The key technologies within the system are an object-oriented database, hypermedia link services and autonomous software agents. KEYWORDS: Navigation, User Trails, Corporate Memory,
Knowledge Management 1 INTRODUCTION
In large companies whose business is critically dependent on the effectiveness of their R&D function, the provision of effective means for staff to access and share all forms of technical information in ways which are relevant to their particular needs is an acute problem. It is often easier to repeat work than it is to determine whether the work has been carried out before.
Steve Loades Unichema International +31 182 542806 steve.loades@ unichema.com
Jacques Halé IBEX Object Systems Ltd. +44 1202 432752 100112.1272@ CompuServe.com
Mike Hatzopulous University of Athens Dept of Informatics +30 1 721 7941
[email protected]
users of the system. 2 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
The MEMOIR architecture is based upon a distributed implementation of the open hypermedia architecture used by the well known Microcosm system [2,3]. This implementation, known as the Message Router [MR], acts as a hub for other system services to register with. The main framework utilises the ITASCA object database [4] for the management of links and user trails. A suite of agents performs data-mining tasks within the system database, and also resource discovery tasks such as searching the WWW. In addition, the open framework provided by the MR will allow straightforward integration of any existing information infrastructure a corporation may already have (e.g. document management systems, corporate databases). The interface to the system is via a standard WWW browser in order to minimise installation and maintenance requirements. All communications between components use HTTP. 3 EXPLOITING USER TRAILS
The MEMOIR project (ESPRIT 22153) is intended to provide an IT solution to these kinds of problems. The aim is to demonstrate the applicability and integration of advanced, distributed multimedia information systems to support the management of, and access to, diverse sources of technical information in large R&D-based corporations. The key technologies within the system are an objectoriented database, hypermedia link services and autonomous software agents. This paper describes briefly the system architecture and goes on to explain how the system utilises users’ recorded navigation trails to provide navigational assistance to other Permission to make digital/hard copies of all or part of this material for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, the copyright notice, the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copyright is by permission of the ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires specific permission and/or fee. Hypertext 97, Southampton UK © 1997 ACM 0-89791-866-5...$3.50
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A key aspect of MEMOIR in operation is that it minimises any requirement for users to perform additional activities beyond those needed for them to carry out their jobs. To this end, a key element of the system is the automatic recording of user activities which can be used subsequently to provide navigational clues to users. Although there will always be the option of actively querying MEMOIR, the intention is that as a user interacts with various information sources, a trail is recorded detailing the information that has been viewed, the length of time spent at each document, whether the document is printed or bookmarked, etc. The user is able at any point to make all or part of the current trail public. With a number of users working in this way, the system will rapidly accumulate information about the contexts in which documents have been used within a particular organisation.
Given a repository of public trails such as this, the agents within the system can be used to derive associations between documents. The user is able to select a particular type of agent and supply it with a document, or a set of documents (e.g. part of the trail being recorded) in order to determine documents which might provide additional relevant information. There is a wide range of possible algorithms for matching that could be utilised by the MEMOIR agent system, for example: •
Find trails containing the specified list of documents. The other documents in these trails may be relevant to the source documents specified.
•
In addition to the simple pattern matching of item 1, additional trail information such as whether it was printed or bookmarked can be used to determine subjectively how important a document was within the context of a particular trail.
•
A more comprehensive result may be obtained by carrying out comparison of the contents of the various documents in question.
•
In practice some combination of all approaches is likely, and some degree of ‘learning’ may be expected from agents as users interact with them. This will improve the performance of agents as the size of the trail repository increases. As an additional effect of this trail-based approach, users are able to identify other individuals who may be working in a similar area and thus the system is able to enhance communication within the organisation.
5 CURRENT STATUS
A prototype implementation of the MEMOIR framework is currently undergoing user trials. 6 CONCLUSIONS
The MEMOIR system will act as an autonomous system for the accumulation and analysis of users interaction with information resources. The system’s success will be measured by the degree to which it is able to improve access to information and increase communicaton between individuals within a given organisation The key features of the framework are the ability to incorporate existing information resources, and to expose the stored information to the MEMOIR agent suite for sophisticated querying to determine inter-document associations. REFERENCES
1. Carr, L., De Roure, D., Hall, W. and Hill, G., The Distributed Link Service: A Tool for Publishers, Authors and Readers, World Wide Web Journal 1(1), 647-656, O'Reilly & Associates 2. Hill, G. and Hall, W., Extending the Microcosm Model to a Distributed Environment. In: ECHT '94 Proceedings, Edinburgh (September 18-23), Scotland, ACM Press, 32-40, 1994. 3. Hill, G., Wilkins, R. and Hall, W., Open and Reconfigurable Hypermedia Systems: A Filter Based Model. Hypermedia, 5(2), 1993, 103-118 4. The ITASCA OODBMS, http://w3.iprolink.ch/ibexcom/products.htm#ITASCA
4 OTHER MEMOIR SERVICES
In addition to the use of trails, a full range of hypermedia services will be available to allow users to create stronger associations between relevant information resources. The linking facilities will initially be based upon the facilities provided by Microcosm, in particular its generic links. Links will predominantly be presented to the user by automatic insertion into the documents viewed via the WWW interface, using technology developed as part of the Distributed Link Service (DLS) [1]. As with trails, links will be stored in ITASCA. MEMOIR agents will be able to utilise link information to reinforce their resource location capabilities described above. Finally, the system must be able to integrate smoothly with any existing corporate information resources, and these will where possible be incorporated alongside MEMOIR services within the system interface and made available to the MEMOIR agents as a resource.
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