Collaborative Construction of Artifacts

Presenter

Hannes Ebner

Co-authors

Matthias Palmr

Ambjrn Naeve

Motivation

Support for collaborative authoring of Context-maps

Conzilla: tool for construction of context-maps

We wanted support for collaborative authoring of context-maps

Noticed that we are not the only ones with such demands

Tried to formulate the problem and a solution as generically as possible

Problems to avoid

Collaboration around documents is hard

- One editor at a time

- Concurrent changes often require user interaction

- Access rights to the document have to be defined

- Locking might be necessary

Information loss during the collaboration phase

- Lack of provenance information, e.g. authors, modification dates on various parts

- Lack of historical development, e.g. version control

Final version, no continuous improvement

The Solution

Artifacts

- Represented by an identifier and corresponding metadata with a description, intention, target group, etc.

- An open ended set of contributions

- Dependency tree

Information directory

- Manages the metadata

- Keeps track of contributions and their metadata

- Provides pointers to where to find contributions

ArtifactsAn artifact is defined by an identifier and corresponding metadataMetadata includes description, purpose/intention, target group, etcDependency tree with optional and required contributions

Information directoryManages metadataKeeps track of all this information (contributions + metadata)We don't want to refer to contributions in hard wayEvery contribution has an identifier which can be resolved into locations by querying the information directory

Perspectives on an Artifact

Standard perspective as agreed upon by authors and contributors

User perspective: standard perspective plus optional contributions, supports...

- Inspection of metadata of available contributions

- Selection of a range of contributions

- Calculation of a perspective based on the selection

- Reevaluation of a selection

...

Standard perspective as agreed upon by authors and contributors-> is the set of required contributions

User perspective-> is the standard perspective plus optional contributions-> optional contributions can be activated and deactivated on demand

Translated to Context-maps

How does a context-map look like?

- Concepts- Concept relations, the connection between concepts- Content, attached to a concept (link, graphic, something)- Information (metadata on a concept, concept relation or a context-map)- Contextual-neighborhood allows for navigating between maps which use the same concept

Translated to Context-maps

A Context-map is an artifact, a contribution to it may be:

- A range of concepts to include

- Alternative descriptions of already included concepts

- Resources on concepts, such as pictures, documents etc.

A concept may be an artifact, a contribution to it may be:

- Contributions in the form of metadata

- Content

In short: Everything that you need to collaborate around may be an artifact if there exists a mechanism to automatically merge the contributions

Collaborilla
an Information Directory

Information on artifacts

- Type: Context-map, Agent, Container, Concept

- Metadata (title, description, purpose, author/contributor, ...)

- Required and optional contributions

Information on contributions

- Resolves identifiers of contributions to physical resources

- Metadata

Wiki-style editing: No authentication required

Collaborilla
Used Technologies

Current implementation

- LDAP as data store

- WebDAV on top of Subversion for managing contributions

- Clear-text protocol for read and write access, HTTP oriented

Future plans

- Content repository (JCR/JSR-170)

- ReST based Web Services

- Authentication

Conzilla

Concept browser

- Basics: contexts, content, and information

- Authoring tool

Collaborative extension

- Inspect and select contributions

- Author and publish contributions

- Supported by the Collaborilla information directory

Future research

How to go from individual seeding of artifacts to encouraging others to provide contributions

Transparency of ownership

Licensing / reusing

Further information

Knowledge Management Research group, KTH

http://kmr.nada.kth.se

Project pages

http://www.conzilla.org

http://collaborilla.conzilla.org

Open source, contributions welcome!

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