Martin Röscheisen

Beyond browsing: shared comments, SOAPs, trails, and on-line communities

Abstract This paper describes a system we have implemented that enables people to share structured in-place annotations attached to material in arbitrary documents on the WWW. The basic conceptual decisions are laid out, and a prototypical example of the client-server interaction is given. We then explain the usage perspective, describe our experience with using the system, and discuss other experimental usages of our prototype implementation, such as collaborative filtering, seals of approval, and value-added trails. We show how this is a specific instantiation of a more general “virtual document” architecture in which, with the help of light-weight distributed meta information, viewed documents can incorporate material that is dynamically integrated from multiple distributed sources. Development of that architecture is part of a larger project on Digital Libraries that we are engaged in.

Interaction design for shared World-Wide Web annotations

We describe the interaction design for a set of facilities that enable users of an augmented version of the NCSA Mosaic browser to read, write, and filter for annotations on arbitrary segments of World-Wide Web documents, and share them with any other such user.

The Stanford InfoBus and Its Service Layers: Augmenting the Internet with High-Level Information Management Protocols

The Stanford InfoBus is a prototype infrastructure developed as part of the Stanford Digital Libraries Project to extend the current Internet protocols with a suite of higher-level information management protocols. This paper surveys the five service layers pro vided by the Stanford InfoBus: protocols for managing items and collections (DLIOP), metadata (SMA), search (STARTS), payment (UPAI), and rights and obligations (FIRM).

A network-centric design for relationship-based security and access control

As part of the Stanford Digital Libraries Project, we have prototyped a novel architecture for security and access control in heterogeneous, networked environments. Conceptually, this architecture recasts security issues from an “information access” metaphor into a “relationship management” framework and uniformly applies a contracting model. Architecturally, it introduces a “network-centric” design that generalizes previous models of clientor server-centered control into a third, relationship-based form.

Grassroots: providing a uniform framework for communicating, sharing information, and organizing people

People currently use a disparate set of systems such as email, newsgroups, hypermail, shared Web hotlists, hierar– chical indexes, etc. for activities which oflen cut across the boundaries implicit in each of these systems. Grassroots is a system that provides a uniform user-conceptual model to functionalities currently found in such systems, while not requiring people to give up other systems. It is designed to co-exist with and leverage from existing systems. A prototype implementation has been completed based on a Web http proxy.