Information Technology Reference
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Selecting
Scope
Annotating
Linking
Tagging
Semantic
Level
Conceptual
Activities
Syntactic
Level
Core
Interactions
Combining /
Arranging
Inking
Clicking
Bridging
Fig. 3.6 The analytical framework (exemplarily applied to the activities supported by the CoScribe
system, which is introduced in Chs. 4-7)
perform a conceptual activity. Ethnographic observations of users' current practices
are an important method for informing these design decisions.
As we will show below in this section, this principle enables PPUIs that are both
simple and complex: offering complex functionality while being easy to use. This
is mainly due to the fact that the generic core interactions are quite intuitive, as they
are inspired by the traditional cultural techniques of interacting with pen and paper.
3.4.1 Semantic Level of Interaction: Conceptual Activities
The semantic level of interaction models conceptual activities. This covers the func-
tionality that is offered by the interface to support the user in his or her tasks. Hence,
this level is not generic but depends on the purpose the PPUI is designed for.
As the goal of the model is to be generic, we do not go into depth of conceptual
activities here, but illustrate the concept with one example, the CoScribe system
which is introduced in Chapters 4-7. For our application scenario, we identified
three main conceptual activities that users perform when working with documents:
1. Extending documents by annotations
2. Creating references and hyperlinks to express relations between documents and
passages of documents and
3. Creating tags in order to structure the problem domain by translating given con-
tents into higher-order concepts.
These conceptual activities are complemented by a fourth activity, which is an
essential part of the other activities:
 
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