This call for participation details the workshop to be held in conjunction with the ACM Hypertext '97 conference in Southampton. The proposed workshop is the third workshop of this series. The previous two workshops have been HTF I, held in conjunction with the ACM ECHT '94 conference in Edinburgh, and HTF II, held in conjunction with Hypertext '96 in Washington. Both workshops were very successful, raising many important and topical discussions among the attendees. Trip reports on the two workshops have been published online as well as in SIGLINK newsletters.
Ashman Helen, Defence Science and Technology Organisation, Australia
Balasubramarian V., E-Papyrus, Inc, USA
Bieber Michael, New Jersey Institute or Technology, USA
Oinas-Kukkonen Harri, University of Oulu, Finland
Most end-users are reluctant to abandon their current non-hypertext oriented systems in favor of systems providing hypertext functionality. If the majority of users are going to benefit from hypertext functionality, it must be incorporated within the everyday information systems they use with a minimal amount of effort by designers and developers. Thus, as a field, we must look towards augmenting with hypertext functionality the myriad of today's personal, scientific and business systems, which were not designed specifically as hypertext oriented. This should result in new ways to view a system's knowledge and processes conceptually, to navigate among items of interest and analysis stages, to enhance system knowledge with comments and relationships, and to target information displays to individual users and their tasks.
The primary interests of this workshop are all aspects of providing hypertext functionality to software systems which do not have it. Many specialised information systems are designed with little or no hypertext functionality, yet there are many that can benefit from it.
This workshop focuses on hypertext and hypermedia as value-added support functionality, and on the entire process of embedding hypertext functions into non-hypertext oriented information systems. These include a large base of scientific and business applications that people use primarily for their underlying analytic functionality, i.e., not for reading or navigating among large amounts of display information. Hypertext features both supplement and give users access to the application's primary activities. For many of these systems, hypertext will be integrated so seamlessly that users will be unaware of its presence.
This workshop proposes a cross-disciplinary approach to addressing the problems of supporting hypertext functionality (HTF) in a distributed environment for legacy applications and databases, and other systems that dynamically generate their content, offering support for differing user requirements. Our aim is to bring together researchers from a number of relevant fields, including distributed systems, open hypermedia systems, the World Wide Web, management information systems, and systems analysis, design and development, in order to bring a variety of perspectives to address these problems. This cross-disciplinary environment will foster the exchange of useful ideas and promote collaboration between researchers in different fields. One important goal of the proposed workshop is to identify common research interests and to promote subsequent collaboration and cooperation among participants.
HTFIII is a one-day-event being held at April 6, starting at 09:00 and concluding at 17:30. Participants are encouraged to continue discussions informally. An informal dinner on the evening will foster this aim. Pre-workshop activities include the distribution of the position papers via WWW. All participants are expected to have read them before the workshop. The agenda may also include a joint session with the Open Hypermedia Systems workshop (OHS III). Discussion topics will be finalised after assessing the contributions of the invited participants. A draft agenda is:
09:00 Introduction to the workshop; introduce each participant
09:45 Session 1: General Introduction
10:45 Coffee break
11:00 Session 2: Intra- versus Extra-Application HTF
12:30 Lunch break
14:00 Session 3: Distributed Computing Environments
15:45 Coffee break
16:00 Session 4: Collaborative Environments
17:30 Future research issues and possible collaborations
18:00 Break
19:00 Informal dinner
Post-workshop activities will include the reporting of the outcomes of the workshop. A final report taken from the minutes of the meeting will be compiled and disseminated via the SIGLINK newsletter and Web pages. The position papers and final report will also appear as a NJIT technical report.
The number of participants is ideally not more than twenty. The aim is to have representatives from all relevant hypertext research and development areas, and to promote discussion between the different research groups on topics of mutual interest. Researchers and developers from many areas will be able to contribute and benefit from the discussions.
Distributed systems researchers will contribute an understanding of the potential of distributed systems to support future hypermedia systems with ready-made security and communications software, while benefiting from finding out the state of the art in information system-oriented hypermedia research and understanding the special requirements that hypertext functionality may have in a distributed environment.
Open hypermedia systems researchers will be able to contribute by briefing participants on recent developments in interfacing hypermedia systems to external display applications, while benefiting from discussing the requirements of extra-application HTF.
World Wide Web researchers will be able to contribute by briefing us on advanced Web research into interfacing legacy databases via APIs and Common Gateway Interface scripts, use of mobile code technologies such as applets and servlets, and into handling distributed information collections. They would benefit from discovering alternative approaches to interfacing legacy applications, while adequately representing and supporting the different needs of users.
Information systems developers will be able to contribute by characterising the requirements of system integration and users. They will benefit from discussions with researchers in these other fields influencing system integration.
All interested parties are invited to submit a position paper. The submitted papers will be assessed for their relevance to the workshop and the potential for the authors to contribute usefully to the workshop discussions.
Please submit a position paper of between 3-5 pages in length to the primary contact. Emailed submissions in RTF, HTML, any of the Microsoft Word formats, Postscript or plain ASCII are welcome. Each position paper will be refereed and results emailed to authors. Authors of accepted papers may be asked to make some small changes and a final version submitted to the primary contact.
Important dates are:
Primary Contact: Michael Bieber
New Jersey Institute of Technology
CIS Department
Newark, NJ 07102-1982
telephone: +1 201 596-2681
fax: +1 201 596-5777
email: bieber@cis.njit.edu
URL: http://megahertz.njit.edu/~bieber/
Helen Ashman has been working on Defence Hypermedia Information Systems since 1990. Her interests are in modelling of hypermedia concepts, hypermedia developments in the World Wide Web and hypermedia integration in distributed systems. She is joint Programme Chair (with Paul Thistlewaite of ANU) of the forthcoming IW3C2 7th International World Wide Web conference, to be held in Australia in 1998. She has been active in the Ausweb series of regional Web conferences, and will be joint programme chair of Ausweb '97.
V. Balasubramanian ("Bala") is President of E-Papyrus, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in the areas of hypermedia, web-based document delivery, document management, groupware and user interface design. He is currently designing an authoring and publishing system using document management and Web technologies for a large financial institution to deliver product and services marketing information to brokers, clients and the general public. Prior to this, Bala was also instrumental in introducing Web-based information services at Hoffmann-La Roche, a pharmaceutical company. He has also consulted for IBM, Bell Atlantic, and AT&T.
Michael Bieber is Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the New Jersey Institute of Technology's CIS Department, where he directs the Hypermedia Information Systems Lab. He holds a JOVE Faculty Fellowship in the Automation Technology Section at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Michael is active in the ACM Hypertext conferences and co-chairs the Hypermedia in Information Systems "minitrack" at the annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. He also serves as the treasurer of ACM SIGLINK.
Harri Oinas-Kukkonen
is Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the University
of Oulu in Finland. His research interests include CASE, design,
hypertext, argumentation, and team memory. His hypertext functionality
implementation in MetaEdit+ CASE
environment is an exemplary piece of work in the HTF research
stream. He was one of the organizers of the HTF1 and HTF2 workshops.