Laurent Kirsch

The Snippet Platform Architecture - Dynamic and Interactive Compound Documents

Compound documents in desktop environments face many issues and limitations in terms of modularity and genericity with regard to their representation and handling. The Snippet Platform natively supports highly dynamic and interactive compound documents. The contents of a document are not limited to combinations of traditional types like text, images, vector objects, or videos, but are completely generic and thus may even consist of fully-functional embedded applications. These can be operated in-place, enabling a higher level of interactivity. Moreover, complex dependencies within or in between documents are supported. The component-based architecture of the Snippet Platform allows for keeping these in a consistent working state. It realizes application software by an extensible set of functional modules that are designed to interoperate. These may also be combined for performing more advanced transformations on contents or defining more refined algorithmic dependencies. A fine-granular model, based on so-called Snippets instead of files, ensures the persistent representation of such compound documents and their dependencies. A working prototype, also discussed in this paper, incorporates all these aspects.

The snippet system - Reusing and connecting documents

This paper presents the Snippet System, a new operating system environment that aims at providing enhanced document management facilities. For this, the proposed system utilizes a novel document model based on finer-grained entities, so-called Snippets. These support Relations, which capture the context of individual document excerpts. Snippets furthermore enable a flexible reuse of documents, i.e., user-defined excerpts can be included in several other documents with only selected properties remaining synchronized between different instances. Moreover, dedicated mechanisms allow for the efficient retrieval of these instances and thus support the user in keeping track of reused excerpts and synced properties. While the Snippet Systems concepts extend into the application and user interface layers, this paper focuses in particular on the design and prototypical implementation of its document model, describing how the reuse of document excerpts, the synchronization and retrieval of their different instances, and Relations are supported in a natural and scalable way.

Separating features using colored snippet graphs

In feature-oriented software product lines, two complementary approaches to implement features exist: compositional and annotative ones. To combine the respective advantages, a unified representation of the two on the file-system level is desirable, yet unavailable. We pick up this demand and propose a novel concept for separating features using colored snippet graphs instead of directories and files. In particular, our proposed ideas are based on snippets, ASTs and coloring, and enable the implementation of product lines with both compositional and annotative views on real documents. As a basis for future tools, we provide a conceptual overview of our approach, discuss our ideas for leveraging snippets, and demonstrate applicability using an example scenario.

A Native Approach to Semantics and Inference in Fine-Grained Documents

This paper proposes a novel approach for enhancing document excerpts with semantic structures that are treated as first-class citizens, i.e., integrated at the system level. Providing support for semantics at the system level is in contrast with existing solutions that implement semantics as an add-on using intermediate descriptors. A framework and a toolset inspired by the Semantic Web Stack have been integrated into the Snippet System, an operating system environment that provides support for fine-grained representation and management of documents and the relationships that exist between arbitrary excerpts. The high granularity, combined with native support for semantics, is leveraged to alleviate some of the existing personal information management problems in terms of content retrieval and document engineering. The resulting framework offers some inherent advantages in terms of refined resource description, content and knowledge reuse along with self-contained documents that retain their metadata without depending on intermediate entities.