HyNIC: SIGWEB's Digital Library Project: An Invitation to the Community
We'd like to invite the entire SIGWEB community to participate in the design and implementation of HyNIC: SIGWEB's Digital Library project [http://www.acm.org/sigweb/HyNIC.html].
We're going to form four task forces to consider different parts of the project:
- A: Standard Archive Formats
- B: Architecture
- C: Organization and Implementation
- D: Determining Services, Stakeholders and Processes: SIGWEB's Transition to a NIC
Details of each, as well as the project goals and future steps follow below.
Please email Michael Bieber [bieber@njit.edu] if you are interested:
- you would like to work on (a) particular task force(s)
- you just want to receive mailings
Thanks!
Michael Bieber
bieber@njit.edu
http://www-ec.njit.edu/~bieber
SIGWEB's Digital Library Project: HyNIC
The name "HyNIC" comes from the idea Doug Engelbart described in his Hypertext'98 keynote address: Networked Improvement Communities (NICs). Engelbart defines NICs as organizations which continuously improve their meta-improvement structures, i.e., continuously improve the processes they use to improve their products and services. SIGWEB, as a professional society, is continuously looking for ways to improve service to our members. We view the HyNIC as a continuously evolving resource for our community.
HyNIC GOALS
To create an advanced, hypermedia-enhanced digital library, and eventually a NIC for the hypermedia and WWW research communities, to be managed under the auspices of ACM SIGWEB.
- HyNIC will give access to formal and informal materials in the hypertext community such as publications, technical reports, trip reports, audio tapes, video tapes, photographs, example systems, and teaching materials. It also will contain hypermedia concepts such as annotation, trails and overviews.
- HyNIC will serve as a conduit for the diverse research groups in the hypermedia and WWW communities to make their various research systems (compatible and) available (free-of-charge) to all members of the community. We shall also welcome commercial systems to participate, making their systems available free-of-charge for use within the HyNIC project.
- The resulting HyNIC will serve as a community-wide testbed for new hypermedia functionality and systems. It will establish a standard environment with which future research should be compliant. It will then provide a broad research base (the entire research community) for testing new research ideas, and for running large scale experiments.
- HyNIC will contain new ways to represent the knowledge of the SIGWEB community accessible through the digital library (e.g., through concept maps), so the different stakeholders will easily find the relevant information and processes.
- The project will support common processes (tasks) that the community's stakeholders perform. These include teaching, learning, writing a paper compliant with the norms of the research community, publishing, developing compliant software, inserting new materials into the digital library. It also will support the organizational processes of SIGWEB as a professional society, including building a budget, and organizing workshops and conferences.
- Effective communication is vital to a virtual, dispersed community. The project will incorporate structured group communication facilities. This will help members working in specific subareas to communicate and collaborate effectively.
- HyNIC should be a showcase for other organizations. Through the HyNIC project, we hope to develop guidelines (and maybe even a methodology) for other research communities to organize their collective knowledge and make it available to their communities.
HyNIC Tasks and Task Forces
- TASK FORCE A: Standard Archive Formats
Determine the standard archive format(s) for HyNIC's content and metainformation. The content will contain all possible media formats (text, graphics, audio, animation, etc.). These formats must fully support hypermedia structures --- nodes, links and composites, metainformation about all of these, versioning, and the broad range of hypermedia features that the research community has been developing over the years. (See Future Steps below for what's to come, and thus what to support.)
- TASK FORCE B: Architecture
Determine an architecture, within which HyNIC contents can reside anywhere in the world, and community members will be able to access them, all hypermedia features, and tools. Process enactment and communication tools should be planned into the architecture. (See Future Steps below for what's to come, and thus what to support.)
- TASK FORCE C: Organization and Implementation
This task force would plan the implementation of the HyNIC project. This includes helping to set up the environment based on the results of task forces, sending out calls for participation (see below) and generally helping to manage the project.
- TASK FORCE D: Determining Services, Stakeholders and Processes: SIGWEB's Transition to a NIC
This task force will work closely with SIGWEB's leadership to determine all the ways that the HyNIC effort should support SIGWEB as a professional society. As a first step this task force will help identify stakeholders in the hypermedia and WWW communities, and their needs. It then will determine the different tasks and processes that these stakeholders will want to perform, and determine the ways the HyNIC effort can partially or fully support these. We need to ensure that HyNIC's design can serve all appropriate activities. (See Future Steps below for what's to come.)
FUTURE STEPS
(a) Incorporate structured communication features into the HyNIC architecture, so people can actively discuss the contents, as well as refer to the contents in other general discussions within the community.
(b) Create the initial contents. We will put out a call to all community members to make archived content available through our architecture, in our standard formats. To the extent feasible, we also will include access to existing published materials.
(c) Put out a call for community members (as well as commercial companies) to contribute tools supporting hypermedia features (navigation, structural and content query, annotation, trails, overviews, etc.). We also include tools to manage the knowledge maps (step d) and for managing process representation and process enactment (step f). The tools must work within the HyNIC architecture and be compliant with the archive and metainformation standard formats. Tool output must be in a universally accessible and shareable data format. Many tool outputs themselves become part of the digital library. In many cases we expect the various hypermedia research groups to modify existing research tools to comply with the agreed-upon standards. Similarly we hope commercial companies will choose to make their tools compliant and donate them free-of-charge for use in conjunction with HyNIC. We also hope this will spawn a great amount of new research into hypermedia tools.
(d) Put out a call for community members to contribute conceptual views and other knowledge mappings of the corpus, using the tools contributed in step C. These would provide top-level interfaces for HyNIC, representing the knowledge and structure of the hypertext community.
(e) Put out a call for community members to provide sharable instances of the hypermedia features: indexes, tours, annotations, glossaries, links, etc., using the tools contributed in step C. We especially would encourage professors to have students produce these for the community under their guidance.
(f) Put out a call for community members to encode the community processes using the tools contributed in step C.