Matthias Geel

PresiShare: opportunistic sharing and presentation of content using public displays and QR codes

Public displays have seen a widespread adoption in public places such as train stations, airports and museums, where they are often used to show time tables, schedules but also advertisements or complementary information. But even within organisations or universities, public- and semi-public displays have proven themselves to be valuable means of promoting awareness of current events, latest company news, or upcoming meetings and talks. However, opportunistic sharing of content between mobile devices and such displays remains a challenge. In this paper, we present a novel technique based on QR codes to facilitate interaction with public displays and to simplify user interaction. We investigate how web technologies can be used both on the client-side as well as for the infrastructure itself in order to provide a lightweight and flexible architecture. As a proof-of-concept, we developed PresiShare, a web-based platform for presenting and sharing pictures, music and documents on any display. We have evaluated our approach by conducting a formal user study that analyses the interaction techniques proposed. Furthermore, we report our findings from a live deployment within our research group where we collected qualitative feedback and usage statistics.

Exploiting Tag Clouds for Database Browsing and Querying

Querying and browsing of databases is a task exclusively done by experts that have mastered the query language and are familiar with a database’s schema. We show how tag clouds can be used alongside more traditional query languages and data visualisation techniques as a means for browsing and querying databases by both experts and non-expert users. Our approach is based on a general, extensible framework that supports different modes of visualisation as well as different database systems. We have validated our prototype with a user study that has shown how non-experts were able to browse and retrieve data that usually would only be possible by means of queries.

Sift: an end-user tool for gathering web content on the go

Although web sites have started to embed semantic metadata within their documents, it remains a challenge for non-technical end-users to exploit that markup to extract and store information of interest. To address this challenge, we show how tools can be developed that allow users to identify extractable information while browsing and then control how that information should be extracted and stored in a personal library. The proposed approach is based on an extensible framework capable of using different kinds of markup to aid the extraction process and a unique fusion of several well-established techniques from areas such as the semantic web, data warehousing, web scraping and web feeds. We present the Sift tool which is a proof-of-concept implementation of the approach.

Managing Personal Information through Information Components

We introduce the concept of information components and show how it can allow non-expert users to construct their personal information spaces by selecting, customising and composing components defined by the system or other users. The system presented is based on a plug-and-play concept where new user-defined applications can be created and integrated into the portal-style interface based on default templates which can easily be customised by the users.

Mix-n-Match: building personal libraries from web content

We present an approach to web content aggregation that allows information to be harvested from web pages, independent of specific markup languages. It builds on ideas from data warehousing and we present solutions to the well-known problems of data integration, namely detection of equivalences and data cleaning, adapted to this context. We describe how the content aggregation engine has been realised as an extensible framework in such a way that end-users as well as developers can use the associated tools to create personal libaries of content extracted from the web.

Using synchronised tag clouds for browsing data collections

Tag clouds have become a popular means of visualising and browsing data, especially in Web 2.0 applications. We show how they can be used to provide flexible and intuitive interfaces to web search services over data collections by using multiple synchronised tag clouds to browse that data. A data collection can have alternative tag clouds and a tag cloud alternative visualisations, with the choice of tag cloud and visualisation at any time controlled by a combination of user selection, developer specification and default system behaviour. A search interface is defined by an augmented data model that specifies the viewer classes, their associated tag clouds and the visualisations of these tag clouds. We demonstrate the approach by describing how we implemented a web application to browse data related to researchers and their publications.

Orchestrating multi-device presentations with OmniPresent

Meeting rooms and classrooms are increasingly equipped with more than one screen that could be used for presentations. However, current presentation software provides little support for arranging content across multiple screens beyond mirroring slides. We introduce OmniPresent, a system for orchestrating presentations on multiple devices. OmniPresent offers two modes for authoring these orchestrations. The first mode is suited in particular for legacy, single-device presentations and allows a presenter to orchestrate the presentation on the fly by pinning slides to extra screens. The second mode offers complete freedom in allocating slides to available screens by authoring an orchestration script beforehand. We have evaluated the two modes qualitatively in a user study and report on patterns in content and motivation for distributing presentations across multiple screens.

Memsy: Keeping Track of Personal Digital Resources Across Devices and Services

It is becoming increasingly difficult for users to keep track of their personal digital resources given the number of devices and hosting services used to create, process, manage and share them. As a result, personal resources are replicated at different locations and it is often not feasible to keep everything synchronised. In such a distributed setting, the types of questions that users want answers to are: Where is the latest version of this document located? How many versions of this image exist and where are they stored? We introduce the concept of global file histories that can provide users with a unified view of their personal information space across devices and services. As proof-of-concept, we present Memsy, an environment that helps users keep track of their resources. We discuss the technical challenges and present the results of a lab study used to evaluate Memsy’s proposed workflow.

Engineering information management tools by example

While there are many established methodologies for information systems development, designing by example has not been formally explored and applied previously. Our work is also motivated by the desire to explore interface-driven development techniques that could complement existing approaches such as model-driven engineering with the goal of reducing the need for modelling and reengineering of existing applications and interfaces, while still supporting the development task. We explore the example-based technique for rapid development of powerful and flexible information management tools based on the example of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, a system that was originally designed to support the workflow of digital photographers in a flexible way. We analyse experiments in which two new systems---one for managing collections of research papers and another for software project management---were developed based on the Lightroom paradigm. We derive a conceptual framework for engineering by example and assess the method by comparing it to traditional model-driven engineering.

PubLight: managing publications using a task-oriented approach

We report on the development of a powerful and task-oriented tool for the management of research publications. The work was motivated by a survey showing that researchers still rely heavily on basic tools such as text editors for managing bibliographic data. We present the approach as well as the resulting tool, PubLight, and compare the features of this tool with existing reference management systems.