WildDocs - Investigating Construction of Metaphors in Office Work

Author:

Claus Atzenbeck

Email:

atzenbeck-at-cs.aaue.dk

Advisor:

Peter Nürnberg

Award Date:

July 2006

Institution:

Aalborg University

Institution Location:

Aalbor, Denmark

Web Location:

http://www.atzenbeck.de/publications/atzenbeck06.pdf

Abstract:

Knowledge is an important resource in an information society. People use it to develop new products, find new medical treatment to fight diseases, adapt or change international relationships, or gain new knowledge. The amount of knowledge constantly grows and therefore produces the need for tools that help people to structure, store, or retrieve information.

One example of a tool is paper, an old medium that still is used to store, exchange, or retrieve information. People have been refining this carrier to support knowledge worker in managing their work load. Paper needs to be organized. Therefore, libraries were invented even in ancient times that allow, for example, civil servants to reach the information they need efficiently. This is still true today.

In the late 1970s, another tool that aims to solve the problems of structuring, storing, and retrieving of information was introduced: personal computers. They have become normal devices in today's offices, used by millions of office workers.

Computers can run databases that store large amounts of data or offer information retrieval systems that support the user in finding information. Recently, semantic technologies became popular in computer science. They allow applications (so-called "agents") to use attached semantics for improving retrieval related functionality.

Another branch of research and applications focus on structure domains. There is a variety of structures, each built with well-defined tasks in mind. For example, taxonomic structures are appropriate for classification, such as those used in biology. The classification must exist before biologists can start classifying plants or animals.

These techniques may not be appropriate when the final structure is not known. For example, associations come up during brainstorming sessions that do not follow a predefined structure. One way to represent the associations is to use small pieces of paper, write or draw the associated term or a picture on it, and place it on a workspace. During the session, participants can move these nodes around to express relationships among the information snippets. The structure changes constantly over time. Most of the structure is implicit, such as spatial arrangement based on completely freely movable snippets.

Brainstorming sessions usually take only a short period of time. Other paper-based structures, for example, structures of printed articles or books on a desk, evolve over weeks or months. Devices, such as binders, folders, or shelves, help to put them in place. In many cases, offices have to be restructured due to lack of space or growing pieces of information. That leads to emerging spatial arrangements that exist beside predefined ones (e.g., computer science books are located at the top part of the shelve). Also here, spatial structures that were created or modified over time carry implicit metainformation to a large extent. This metainformation is best interpreted by the person who created it.

Most of this implicit information happened to be created without any explicit intention. For example, there may be a sloppily arranged pile of articles at the right side of the desk, because there was no place on the left side. Furthermore, it is sloppy, because the office worker did not have time to align it properly. The person knows that this is a preliminary pile, because of its position and its shape.

There are computer applications that support the informal creation of spatial structure. Examples include spatial hypertext application. They are based on a cards-on-table metaphor. However, physical cards on a table look and behave differently to shapes in spatial hypertext applications. As many metaphor-based applications, spatial hypertext applications' metaphor implementations are highly abstract, compared to the original real world referents. Many influences that makes spatial structure emerge over time, as described above, are ignored. This causes the reduction of implicit metainformation.

For example, physical forces (e.g., gravity or friction) or incidental rotation during moving an object are ignored. The size of the space is practicably unlimited in applications, whereas the real world has limited space on a desk. A closer look shows that physical paper structures are of higher complexity than equivalent metaphor-based implementations.

In this thesis, we describe different structures created with paper and propose a classification scheme. Then, we compare these structures to selected computer applications. We argue that the discovered aspects may improve finding and organizing of information. However, most are not implemented in applications due to a high abstraction level.

For this thesis we focus on rapid zooming, rotation, and fixed size documents. We claim that those interactions or attributes will decrease the time for finding information significantly, because they support natural interaction and/or emerging implicit metainformation. In order to test this, we built a prototype, WildDocs, a 2D-based spatial application that supports the requested features. We found our expectations about more effective information retrieval partly supported.

This thesis includes a detailed discussion of WildDocs. One basic concept of this application is that all documents are considered structured and structuring at the same time. The implementation is based on the classification for paper structures we defined and provides a high degree of freedom to system developers to add new document types.

Furthermore, we point to related areas that are of future interest. Those include extending WildDocs to support paper-like movement (e.g., through simulation of gravity or friction), or act on physical/digital mixed environments or as window manager. We also describe an input device that is designed to match WildDocs's navigation and zooming features.

Finally, we discuss WildDocs and its integration in structural computing environments.