Paper is still preferred to digital document systems for tasks involving annotating, folding, juxtaposing, or otherwise treating the document as a tactile object. Based on the Multivalent Documents model, Multivalent annotations bring to digital documents of potentially any source format, from PostScript to SGML, an open ended variety of user-extensible, sharable manipulations. Several very different forms of distributed annotation based on this model have been implemented. The Multivalent framework composes together annotations of any type, which can result in novel, useful combinations. 1. Introduction Digital documents are superior in many ways to their paper counterparts. They are easier to edit, reproduce, distribute, and search than paper documents. While these advantages have led to the dominance of the digital format for document preparation, paper still provides much functionality that is simply unavailable via the digital medium. An important class of capabilities that explo...

This paper presents a novel image editing program emphasizing easy selection and manipulation of material found in informal, casual documents such as sketches, handwritten notes, whiteboard images, screen snapshots, and scanned documents. The program, called ScanScribe, offers four significant advances. First, it presents a new, intuitive model for maintaining image objects and groups, along with underlying logic for updating these in the course of an editing session. Second, ScanScribe takes advantage of newly developed image processing algorithms to separate foreground markings from a white or light background, and thus can automatically render the background transparent so that image material can be rearranged without occlusion by background pixels. Third, ScanScribe introduces new interface techniques for selecting image objects with a pointing device without resorting to a palette of tool modes. Fourth, ScanScribe presents a platform for exploiting image analysis and recognition methods to make perceptually significant structure readily available to the user. As a research prototype, ScanScribe has proven useful in the work of members of our laboratory, and has been released on a limited basis for user testing and evaluation. KEYWORDS: ScanScribe, rough document, WYPIWYG, perceptual document editing, foreground/background, lattice grouping, bitmap image

To meet the service demands created by the Internet's exponential growth, operators are scrambling to deploy application-level services, including Web caches, commerce servers, and intelligent transformation proxies for mobile "thin clients." On the one hand, the Internet's growth rate places unprecedented scalability and robustness demands on these services; on the other hand, that same growth rate demands that new services be developed, deployed, and evolved at a pace that is precipitous even by the standards of today's desktop software development cycles. We demonstrate that for a certain class of applications, these apparently conflicting goals can be reconciled by completely separating the application logic from the runtime support for scalability and high ...

The creation of large, networked, digital document resources has greatly facilitated information access and dissemination. We suggest that such resources can further enhance how we work with information, namely, that they can provide a substrate that supports collaborative work. We focus on one form of collaboration, annotation, by which we mean any of an open-ended number of creative document manipulations which are useful to record and to share with others. Widespread digital document dissemination required technological enablers, such as web clients and servers. The resulting infrastructure is one in which information may be widely shared by individuals across administrative boundaries. To achieve the same ubiquitous availability for annotation requires providing support for spontaneous collaboration, that is, for collaboration across administrative boundaries without significant prior agreements. Annotation is not more commonplace, we suggest, because the technological needs of sp...

Currently, there exist a large number of superb digital libraries, all of which are, unfortunately, vertically integrated and all presenting a monolithic interface to their users. Ideally, a user would want to locate resources from a variety of digital libraries dealing only with one interface. A number of approaches exist to this interoperability issue exist including: defining a universal protocol for all libraries to adhere to; or developing mechanisms to translate between protocols. The approach we illustrate in this paper is to push down the level of universal protocols to one for digital object communication and for communication for simple archives. This approach creates the opportunity for digital library service providers to create digital libraries tailored to the needs of user communities drawing from available archives and individual publishers who adhere to this standard. We have created a reference implementation based on the hyper text transfer protocol (http) with the...

Buckets are an aggregative, intelligent construct for publishing in digital libraries. The goal of research projects is to produce information. This information is often instantiated in several forms, differentiated by semantic types (report, software, video, datasets, etc.). A given semantic type can be further differentiated by syntactic representations as well (PostScript version, PDF version, Word version, etc.). Although the information was created together and subtle relationships can exist between them, different semantic instantiations are generally segregated along currently obsolete media boundaries. Reports are placed in report archives, software might go into a software archive, but most of the data and supporting materials are likely to be kept in informal personal archives or discarded altogether. Buckets provide an archive-independent container construct in which all related semantic and syntactic data types and objects can be logically grouped together, archived, and ma...

The DASHER Project at USC/ISI has focused upon helping organizations with rapid-response mission requirements. Such organizations need to be able to quickly stand up tiger teams backed by the information, materiel, and support services they need to do their job. To do so, they need to find and assess sources of those services who are potential participants in the tiger team. To support this very initial phase of team development, the project has developed information analysis tools that help make sense of sets of data sources in an intranet or internet: characterizing them, partitioning them, sorting and filtering them. These tools focus on three key issues in forming a collaborative team: helping individuals responsible for forming the team to understand what is available, helping them structure and categorize on the information available to them in a manner specifically suited to the task at hand, and helping them understand the mappings between their organization of the information and those used by others who might participate. DASHER’s Information Space Analysis Tools are unique in combining multiple methods to assist in this task. This makes the suite particularly well-suited to integrating additional technologies in order to create specialized systems.

. We present the Smart Object, Dumb Archive (SODA) model for digital libraries (DLs). The SODA model transfers functionality traditionally associated with archives to the archived objects themselves. We are exploiting this shift of responsibility to facilitate other DL goals, such as interoperability, object intelligence and mobility, and heterogeneity. Objects in a SODA DL negotiate presentation of content and handle their own terms and conditions. In this paper we present implementations of our smart objects, buckets, and our dumb archive (DA). We discuss the status of buckets and DA and how they are used in a variety of DL projects. 1 Introduction The Smart Object, Dumb Archive (SODA) model for digital libraries (DLs) was developed within the context of NCSTRL+ [15], the joint NASA Langley Research Center and Old Dominion University extension of the Networked Computer Science Technical Report Library (NCSTRL) [1]. The premise of the SODA model is a separation of responsibi...

This paper examines the issues arising in curriculum development and implementation with the advent of digital libraries. Digital libraries can provide effective support in the curriculum areas of presentation, exploration of material, and assessment. Support from digital libraries will aid educators in development of the curriculum. The improved curriculum will provide students with clearer presentations, more focused exploration of the material, and integrated assessments. Issues in digital library support of curriculum development include ways to address the needs of different users, the importance of complexity management, the requirements for digital libraries, the difference in student capabilities, and the emergence of national-level digital libraries. Digital library support for curriculums is an area of active research and one that is likely to be a significant factor in the ongoing transformation of the education process worldwide.

Multivalent documents" is a model of documents that addresses some of the shortcomings one currently encounters when manipulating documents in digital form. In the multivalent document model, a document is composed out of distributed data and program resources, called layers and behaviors, respectively. The model exposes virtually all aspects of document processing to behaviors, and provides the means to compose these components into a single coherent document. Behaviors allow the model to be highly extensible, including the capability to be extended to work with arbitrary document formats. We have implemented the model in Java, and developed behaviors that support multiple document types (scanned page images, HTML, and ASCII) and a number of different user-interface metaphors (e.g., "lenses" and "Notemarks"). The multivalent document model enables one to better use digital documents for tasks in which paper documents are still otherwise superior to digital documents, such as annotating someone else's document. We have shown how the model is naturally conducive to realizing powerful forms of distributed, open annotation by implementing a variety of annotation types, some familiar and some novel.