Unmil P. Karadkar

Managing change on the web

Increasingly, digital libraries are being defined that collect pointers to World-Wide Web based resources rather than hold the resources themselves. Maintaining these collections is challenging due to distributed document ownership and high fluidity. Typically a collections maintainer has to assess the relevance of changes with little system aid. In this paper, we describe the Waldens Paths Path Manager, which assists a maintainer in discovering when relevant changes occur to linked resources. The approach and system design was informed by a study of how humans perceive changes of Web pages. The study indicated that structural changes are key in determining the overall change and that presentation changes are considered irrelevant.

Managing distributed collections: evaluating Web page changes, movement, and replacement

Distributed collections of Web materials are common. Bookmark lists, paths, and catalogs such as Yahoo! Directories require human maintenance to keep up to date with changes to the underlying documents. The Waldens paths path manager is a tool to support the maintenance of distributed collections. Earlier efforts focused on recognizing the type and degree of change within Web pages and identifying pages no longer accessible. We now extend this work with algorithms for evaluating drastic changes to page content based on context. Additionally, we expand on previous work to locate moved pages and apply the modified approach to suggesting page replacements when the original page cannot be found. Based on these results we are redesigning the path manager to better support the range of assessments necessary to manage distributed collections.

Perception of content, structure, and presentation changes in Web-based hypertext

The Web provides access to a wide variety of information but much of this information is fluid; it changes, moves, and occasionally disappears. Bookmarks, paths over Web pages, and catalogs like Yahoo! are examples of page collections that can become out-of-date as changes are made to their components. Maintaining these collections requires that they be updated continuously. Tools to help in this maintenance require an understanding of what changes are important, such as when pages no longer exist, and what changes are not, such as when a visit counter changes. We performed a study to look at the effect of the type and quantity of change on peoples perception of its importance. Subjects were presented pairs of Web pages with changes to either content (e.g., text), structure (e.g., links), or presentation (e.g., colors, layout). While changes in content were the most closely connected to subjects perceptions of the overall change to a page, subjects indicated a strong desire to be notified of structural changes. Subjects only considered the simultaneous change of many presentation characteristics as important.

Browsing intricately interconnected paths

Graph-centric and node-centric browsing are the two commonly identified hypertext-browsing paradigms. We believe that path-centric browsing, the browsing behavior exhibited by path interfaces, is an independent browsing paradigm that combines useful aspects of the two commonly supported cases. Paths have long been recognized as an effective medium for aggregating and communicating information and have been included in various hypermedia systems as alternate metaphors or supporting tools. The Waldens Paths project promotes path-centric traversal as the primary browsing mechanism over Web-based materials. This paper expands the notion of our paths to include more generalized structures and interconnections across paths. We present an architecture for describing complex networks of such paths. Finally, we discuss the design and present a prototype implementation of the Path Engine, a tool that provides a linear interface for browsing intricately interconnected paths.

Display-agnostic hypermedia

In the diversifying information environment, contemporary hypermedia authoring and filtering mechanisms cater to specific devices. Display-agnostic hypermedia can be flexibly and efficiently presented on a variety of information devices without any modification of their information content. We augment context-aware Trellis (caT) by introducing two mechanisms to support display-agnosticism: development of new browsers and architectural enhancements. We present browsers that reinterpret existing caT hypertext structures for a different presentation. The architectural enhancements, called MIDAS, flexibly deliver rich hypermedia presentations coherently to a set of diverse devices.

Longitudinal study of changes in blogs

Web-based distributed collections often include links to documents that are expected to change frequently, such as blogs. The study reported here demonstrates that blog changes follow specific patterns. The results also illustrate the substantial role of standardized templates in blog pages. These results extend our earlier models that assess the significance of Web page change from a human perspective. These improved models will enable software systems to assist human collection managers in identifying unexpected changes and aberrant events.

Dynamically growing hypertext collections

Many approaches have been pursued over the years to facilitate creating, organizing, and sharing collections of materials extracted from large information spaces. Little attention, in the context of hypertext collections, has been paid to the addition of new materials to these collections over time. Traditionally, human maintainers manually incorporate new materials into existing collections as they appear in the underlying network. In this paper we address the issues involved in supporting the creation and maintenance of dynamically growing hypertextual collections. We describe a prototype implementation for automatically including additional, relevant materials into Web-based collections. Our prototype uses the metaphor of hypertextual paths, a proven technique for layering metastructure atop existing hypertextual materials, which is particularly well suited to accommodating growing collections.

Employing Smart Browsers to Support Flexible Information Presentation in Petri Net-Based Digital Libraries

For effective real-life use, digital libraries must incorporate resource and system policies and adapt to user preferences and device characteristics. The caT (context-aware Trellis) hypertext model incorporates these policies and adaptation conditions within the Petri net specification of the digital library to support context-aware delivery of digital documents in a dynamically changing environment. This paper describes extensions to the caT architecture for supporting adaptation via smarter browsers and an external resource store to provide greater flexibility in information presentation. Browsers request resources that they can best display with their knowledge of intrinsic capabilities and constraints imposed on them by the devices that they run on. The data store returns the most appropriate version of a resource in response to browser requests, thus allowing maintainers of libraries to add, modify and remove resources without any changes to the structure, presentation or document pointers in the digital library.

EBat: A technology-enriched life sciences research community

We are leveraging Web-based technology to create an online community for Life Science research. Our prototype community for cardiovascular research with live bats, called eBat, consists of local researchers as well as remote collaborators. The eBat project offers scientists and students a remote-controlled microscope for conducting experiments, a message board and a chat system for scheduled as well as spontaneous communication, and an online peer-reviewed manuscript repository. In this paper, we report our observations of the use of the eBat infrastructure by local researchers over a period of six months. Resident researchers quickly adopted the eBat infrastructure. eBat technology has now become an indispensable part of the local research group and is used extensively for coordination, communication, and awareness. eBat complements face-to-face interactions well and has resulted in improved communication amongst lab members. We are currently exploring the extension of eBat technology to include distant researchers in live cardiovascular research experiments. We discuss our initial experiences with adapting the eBat infrastructure for research-at-a-distance and the lessons learned from these initial interactions.

Information management in the humanities: Scholarly processes, tools, and the construction of personal collections

The promise and challenge of information management in the humanities has garnered a great deal of attention and interest (Bulger et al., ; Freiman et al., ; Trace & Karadkar, ; University of Minnesota Libraries, ; Wilson & Patrick, ). Research libraries and archives, as well as groups from within the humanities disciplines themselves, are being tasked with providing robust support for information management practices, including helping to engage humanities scholars with appropriate digital technologies in ways that are sensitive to disciplinary‐based cultures and practices. However, significant barriers impede this work, primarily because the infrastructure (services, tools, and collaborative networks) to support scholarly information management is still under development. Under the aegis of the Scholars Tracking Archival Resources (STAR) project we are studying how humanities scholars gather and manage primary source materials with a goal of developing software to support their information management practices. This article reports the findings from our interviews with 26 humanities scholars, in conjunction with a set of initial requirements for a mobile application that will support scholars in capturing documents, recreating the archival context, and uploading these documents to cloud storage for access and sharing from other devices.