Robert J. Glushko

An XML framework for agent-based E-commerce

C ommerceNet’s eCo System initiative, launched in 1996, aims to transform the World-Wide Web into an agent-based infrastructure for Internet commerce. Today’s Web gives people unprecedented access to online information and services. But its information is delivered in format-oriented, handcrafted hypertext markup language (HTML), making it understandable only through human eyes. Software agents and search engines have difficulty using the information because it is not semantically encoded. Clever programmers work around some of HTML’s inherent limitations by using proprietary tags or software that “scrapes” Web pages to extract content. Unfortunately, such ad hoc approaches do not scale. Proprietary tags require browser plug-ins, and scraping approaches require a customized script for each Web site. These approaches balkanize the Web, making it inaccessible to agents. Emerging standards for commercial document exchange promise open business-to-business e-commerce.

Seven Contexts for Service System Design

Many of the most complex service systems being built and imagined today combine person-to-person encounters, technology-enhanced encounters, self-service, computational service s, multi-channel, multi-device, and location-based and context-aware services. This paper examines the characteristic concerns and methods for these seven different design contexts to propose a unifying view that spans them, especially when the service-system is “information-intensive.” A focus on the information required to perform the service, how the responsibility to provide this information is divided between the service provider and service consumer, and the patterns that govern information exchange yields a more abstract description of service encounters and outcomes. This makes it easier to see the systematic relationships among the contexts that can be exploited as design parameters or patterns, such as the substitutability of stored or contextual information for person-to-person interactions. A case study for the design of a “smart multi-channel bookstore” illustrates the use of the different design contexts as building blocks for service systems.

Spatial Comprehension and Comparison Processes in Verification Tasks

Abstract Two experiments use the sentence-picture verification paradigm to study encoding and comparison processes with spatial information. Subjects decided whether a spatial description of a figure or a geometric figure matched a second figure. Three critical results (the effects of display complexity, the effects of lexical markedness, and the relative speeds of “same” and “different” responses) covaried across four experimental conditions. These results demonstrate that task-specific variables can be the primary determinants of how subjects verify sentences. When the two displays were presented successively and subjects took as much time as they needed to prepare for the test figure, verification time was not affected by the pictorial complexity of the test figure or by the markedness of the relational terms used in the descriptions, and “same” responses were faster than “different” responses. When subjects had less time to study the spatial description before the test picture appeared, the effects of complexity and lexical markedness on verification time increased and were largest when the two displays appeared simultaneously; concurrently, “differents” became faster than “sames.” This pattern of results is not easily handled by current models for sentence-picture verification.

Designing service systems by bridging the “front stage” and “back stage”

Service management and design has largely focused on the interactions between employees and customers. This perspective holds that the quality of the “service experience” is primarily determined during this final “service encounter” that takes place in the “front stage.” This emphasis discounts the contribution of the activities in the “back stage” of the service value chain where materials or information needed by the front stage are processed. However, the vast increase in web-driven consumer self-service applications and other automated services requires new thinking about service design and service quality. It is essential to consider the entire network of services that comprise the back and front stages as complementary parts of a “service system.” We need new concepts and methods in service design that recognize how back stage information and processes can improve the front stage experience. This paper envisions a methodology for designing service systems that synthesizes (front-stage-oriented) user-centered design techniques with (back stage) methods for designing information-intensive applications.

Intellectual property rights for digital library and hypertext publishing systems: an analysis of Xanadu

Copyright law is being applied to works in digital form. The special character of digital media will inevitably require some adjustments in the copyright model if digital libraries and hypertext publishing environments are to become as commercially viable as the print industries have been. An intellectual property system works only when it embodies a reasonably accurate model of how people are likely to behave, but it is hard to predict author and reader behavior in an environment that has yet to be built. By far the most ambitious proposal for a digital library and hypertext publishing environment is Ted Nelson’s Xamdu system. This paper reviews the intellectual property scheme in Xanadu and contrasts it with current copyright law. Xanadu’s predictions about reader and author behavior are examined in light of how people currently behave in computer conferencing, electronic mail, and similar existing systems. These analyses identify some respects in which intellectual property systems might have to be changed to make digital libraries and hypertext publishing systems viable.

Design issues for multi-document hypertexts

Vannevar Bush conceived of hypertext as the “computer glue” that binds information from a wide variety of books, documents, communications, and other artifacts to enhance its accessibility and usefulness. However, most of the recent hyper-activity in research labs and in the marketplace falls short of Bush’s vision. Most hypertext software is oriented toward hypertext as a new form of writing via incremental combination of bits and pieces of information. These hypertext programs typically provide little support for converting existing information from its more linear printed form, Where hypertexts have been created from existing text, they generally have been converted from a single encyclopedia ([Glus88], [Oren87]), a single reference document (D%isSS], [Per188], [Paym88]), or a single system’s documentation ([Egan89], [Walk88a]). Hypertexts that integrate the complete contents of more than one book or large document seem nonexistent, even though the expected benefits from such multi-document hypertexts were the original motivation for the concept.

Categorization in the wild

In studying categorization, cognitive science has focused primarily on cultural categorization, ignoring individual and institutional categorization. Because recent technological developments have made individual and institutional classification systems much more available and powerful, our understanding of the cognitive and social mechanisms that produce these systems is increasingly important. Furthermore, key aspects of categorization that have received little previous attention emerge from considering diverse types of categorization together, such as the social factors that create stability in classification systems, and the interoperability that shared conceptual systems establish between agents. Finally, the profound impact of recent technological developments on classification systems indicates that basic categorization mechanisms are highly adaptive, producing new classification systems as the situations in which they operate change.

XML and electronic commerce: enabling the network economy

There has been a lot of talk about how the Internet is going to change the world economy. Companies will come together in a “plug and play” fashion to form trading partner networks. Virtual companies will be established and new business models can be created based on access to information and agents that can carry it around the world using computer networks.

Transforming text into hypertext for a compact disc encyclopedia

A hypertext version of a multi-volume engineering encyclopedia on a compact disc is described. The methods for characterizing the explicit and implicit structure of the document, the novel user interface to the compact disc version, and the design and development lessons that apply to any hypertext project involving realistic amounts of text and graphics are discussed.

Structure, navigation, and hypertext: the status of the navigation problem

Are hypertext intrinsically confusing, disorienting, and distracting? Is hypertext disorientation a danger which skilled writers can avoid, or which technological tools can ameliorate? Or is the Navigation Problem a myth, an artifact of early efforts, a misunderstanding? These questions lie at the center both of current hypertext research and of current technical writing practice; the answers will profoundly influence the design of human-machine interfaces.