The World-Wide Web (W 3 ) initiative is a practical project to bring a global information universe into existence using available technology. This article describes the aims, data model, and protocols needed to implement the "web", and compares them with various contemporary systems. The Dream Pick up your pen, mouse or favorite pointing device and press it on a reference in this document - perhaps to the author's name, or organization, or some related work. Suppose you are directly presented with the background material - other papers, the author's coordinates, the organization's address and its entire telephone directory. Suppose each of these documents has the same property of being linked to other original documents all over the world. You would have at your fingertips all you need to know about electronic publishing, high-energy physics or for that matter Asian culture. If you are reading this article on paper, you can only dream, but read on. Since Vannevar Bush's article [1],...

Inspired by Hill and Hollan's original work [6], we have been developing a theory of interaction history and building tools to apply this theory to navigation in a complex information space. We have built a series of tools --- map, trails, annotations and signposts --- based on a physical-world navigation metaphor. These tools have been in use for over a year. Our user study involved a controlled browse task and showed that users were able to get the same amount of work done with significantly less effort. Keywords information navigation, information foraging, interaction history, Web browsing INTRODUCTION Digital information has no history. It comes to us devoid of the patina that forms on physical objects as they are used. In the non-digital world we make extensive use of these traces to guide our actions, to make choices, and to find things of importance or interest. We call this area interaction history; that is, the records of the interactions of people and objects. Physical o...

This article summarizes the historical development of major advances in humancomputer interaction technology, emphasizing the pivotal role of university research in the advancement of the field.

Hypertexts may be implicitly structured, based on either node content or context. In this paper, we examine implicit structures that rely on the interpretation of node’s spatial context. Hypertext authors and readers can perceive and understand these idiosyncratic structures, but, because they are implicit, they cannot be used by the system to support users ’ activities. We have explored spatially structured hypertext authored in three different systems, and have developed heuristic recognition algorithms based on the results of our analyses of the kinds of structures that people build. Our results indicate that (1) recognition of implicit structures in spatial hypertext is feasible, (2) interaction will be important in guiding such recognition, and (3) the hypertext system can provide layout facilities that will render later systematic interpretation much easier. Found structures can be used as a basis for supporting information management, as a straightforward way of promoting knowledge-base evolution, as a way of solving representational problems endemic to many hypertext systems, or as a basis for collaboration or interaction.

The SHARE project seeks to apply information technologies in helping design teams gather, organize, re-access, and communicate both informal and formal design information to establish a "shared understanding" of the design and design process. This paper presents the visions of SHARE, along with the research and strategies undertaken to build an infrastructure toward its realization. A preliminary prototype environment is being used by designers working on a variety of industry sponsored design projects. This testbed continues to inform and guide the development of NoteMail, MovieMail, and Xshare, as well other components of the next generation SHARE environment that will help distributed design teams work together more effectively.

The World Wide Web (WWW) is becoming increasingly important for business, education, and entertainment. Popular web browsers make access to Internet information resources relatively easy for novice users. Simply by clicking on a link, a new page of information replaces the current one on the screen. Unfortunately however, after following a number of links, people can have difficulty remembering where they’ve been and navigating links they have followed. As one’s collection of web pages grows and as more information of interest populates the web, effective navigation becomes an issue of fundamental importance. We are developing a prototype zooming browser to explore alternative mechanisms for navigating the WWW. Instead of having a single page visible at a time, multiple pages and the links between them are depicted on a large zoomable information surface. Pages are scaled so that the page in focus is clearly readable with connected pages shown at smaller scales to provide context. As a link is followed the new page becomes the focus and existing pages are dynamically repositioned and scaled. Layout changes are animated so that the focus page moves smoothly to the center of the display surface while contextual information provided by linked pages scales down. While our browser supports multiscale representations of existing HTML pages, we have also extended HTML to support multiscale layout within a page. This extension, Multi-Scale Markup Language (MSML), is at an early stage of development. It currently supports inclusion within a page of variable-sized dynamic objects, graphics, and other interface mechanisms from our

Hypertext began as a vision of interconnected reference materials [Bush 1945] and literature [Robertson 1998]. These early visions were joined by working systems that supported link-based navigation among documents as well as branching points within (hyper)documents [Engelbart 1984]. As the use of hypertext systems became more widespread, researchers realized that readers could become confused or lost as they navigated large networks

There are many models of hypertext, distinguished by a number of factors such as the underlying semantic data model (link typing and node typing), the degree of dynamic linking in the hypertext, and how dynamism and other behaviours are implemented. This essay examines a particular approach to dynamism in hypertext, based on the degree of similarity between a text passage in a source node and the text of a target node. It reviews work carried out over the past decade in creating systems for markup-based querying and dynamic hypertext, with particular emphasis on a model of dynamic hypertext that computes hypertext links on the fly using queries.

Abstract. An intelligence analyst often needs to keep track of more facts than can be held in human memory. As a result, analysts use a notebook or evidence file to record facts learned so far. In practice, the evidence file is often an electronic document into which text snippets and hand-typed notes are placed. While this kind of evidence file is easy to read and edit, it provides little help for making sense of the captured information. We describe Entity Workspace, a tool designed to be used in place of a traditional evidence file. Entity Workspace combines user interface and entity extraction technologies to build up an explicit model of important entities (people, places, organizations, phone numbers, etc.) and their relationships. Using this model, it helps the analyst find and re-find facts rapidly, notice connections between entities, and identify good documents and entities to explore next. 1 The Need for a Better Evidence File An intelligence analyst working on a case may encounter hundreds of documents. Each document, in turn, may contain any number of facts relevant to the case. The

The continuing micro-miniaturization of components has moved high-powered, microprocessor-based machines from the desktop, to the laptop, to notebook-sized, and now to palmtop computers. These machines are distinguished in their hardware technology, but supporting software has not kept pace: the predominant operating system on such machines is MS-DOS, absent integrated support for distributed computing. With the LITTLE WORK project, I propose to close this gap in the information technology environment. The LITTLE WORK prototype will be a notebook computer well-endowed with memory and local disk. It will run the Mach operating system and an AFS cache manager, operating predominantly in a dataless mode. The network interface will be the serial port, attached to a fixed or cellular phone attached to a high-speed modem. To economize on limited network bandwidth and substantial cellular phone charges, AFS will be engineered to support compressed headers and to operate in a disconnected mode...