Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
6.3 Sharing of Hyperlinks
As with annotations, CoScribe supports sharing hyperlinks with other users. The
default setting is that hyperlinks are visible to members of the user's group. If the
user wants to set a different visibility, he or she can use classification buttons intro-
duced for annotations in Section 5.2. Shared hyperlinks are made available in the
document viewer, in the ecological view and in subsequent printouts of a document.
In the document viewer, shared links of other users are displayed in a similar
manner as shared annotations (see Section 5.3 above). In addition to the annotations
of a particular user, the single-user view includes the hyperlinks made by this user. In
the multi-user view, the symbols of shared hyperlinks are displayed in a down-scaled
manner. Similarly to shared annotations, shared hyperlinks can be copied into the
own script or can be removed from the view. The visualization of shared hyperlinks
in the printed representation follows the same principle as the visualization of shared
annotations.
6.4 Ecological View
The document viewers display a visualization that corresponds to an
individual doc-
ument
. However, as shown in Section 1.1, one of the main advantages of paper is
that one can lay out multiple sheets and documents on the desk. This provides for a
better overview of documents and their relations. We designed a digital visualization
that corresponds to an augmented view of the
entire desk
. This so-called ecological
view integrates all documents into one single interactive visualization. Its focus is
on the relations between documents and on the activities that users performed on
them.
This view is a digital equivalent to the arrangement of multiple documents in
the physical workspace. However, in contrast to related work (e.g. [167]), it does
not aim at mirroring the
physical
arrangement ony by one. Instead, it details on
the
logical
relations between documents. Documents are not visualized near each
other because their physical locations are close, but because they are connected by
a hyperlink, tagged with the same tag concept or used by the same person. This
provides for a structured access to the information of document collections. The
following scenario exemplifies how the ecological view can be used:
Scenario 14 (Structured Access to Information)
During the last few weeks, Sally
has frequently met her learning partners. Together, they have revised the lecture
handouts, have read many further documents and have written some new docu-
ments. Now that the final exam is arriving, Sally wants to review all information
which is related to Molieres comedies, one of the topics of the exam. She selects the
tag “Moliere” and has direct access to all information that was tagged with this la-
bel. Moreover, she seeks a document of which she does not remember the contents.
But she knows that Dan has extensively worked on it during one of their first meet-
