Call for Papers

The Seventh International Workshop on Hypertext Functionality

Organizational Memory Systems & HTF

 http://www.tol.oulu.fi/~hok/htf7/cfp.htm -- Information last updated: August 12, 1998
To be held in December 12-13, 1998 -- Prior International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS '98)
 
 
 
The Seventh International Workshop on Hypertext Functionality (HTF 7) will focus on organizational memory systems and hypertext functionality. The meeting will be held on December 12-13, 1998 at the University of Helsinki preceding ICIS '98. This one-and-half-day event provides a forum for discussing research contributions addressing the problems of supporting hypertext functionality in organizational memory systems. The workshop encourages a cross-disciplinary approach to questions at hand. The aim is to have representatives from all relevant research and development areas, and to promote discussion on topics of mutual interest. The number of participants will be between 20-25. The workshop is expected to be discussion-oriented, though some paper presentations and plenaries may be organized.

The Hypertext Functionality Workshops

Work in the intersection of hypertext and software systems has grown significantly in volume, quality, and diversity. In addition to incorporating hypertext functionality into software systems, new areas of interest include engineering of hypertext capabilities, conceptual and practical metaphors for software architectures and, most importantly, areas of overlap with the WWW community, the MIS field, and the Open Hypermedia Systems (OHS) community. Therefore, whereas the first three HTF workshops were held in association with the hypertext conference series in Edinburgh (HTF I), Washington D.C. (HTF II), and Southampton (HTF III), the next four workshops will be named HTF IV, HTF V, HTF VI, and HTF VII, respectively, and they will be held in conjunction with the WWW7 conference at Brisbane, ICSE '98 at Kyoto, Hypertext '98 at Pittsburgh, and ICIS '98 at Helsinki. While all upcoming meetings in this HTF workshop series still share the underlying theme of hypertext functionality, each will be tailored to the emphasis and unique interests of the adjoining conference. In summary, our goal is to expand the scope of the HTF workshop series, reach out to a broader, more diverse audience and influence and be influenced by the SE, WWW, OHS, and MIS fields.

HTF7 Workshop Theme: Organizational Memory Systems

There is increasing interest among developers, end-users, and researchers in the problems of sharing information among distributed work groups in organisations - providing some form of shared or common information "space", and how to "grow" some form of "organizational memory" over time as a common resource for people in organisations. While it is important not to reify this concept of "organizational memory", the label can still serve as a useful heuristic to describe a set of concerns about how information is collated, stored, accessed, accreted, updated, and used in organisations.

For all its potential, we have not yet found a way to tap the value in an organization's informal knowledge. The creation and use of organizational memory cannot be a by-product. If we are to find ways of preserving the asset of informal knowledge, we must look within the practices of everyday teamwork and change them. Creating an effective organizational memory system entails creating new tools and new practices, making changes in technology as well as culture.

The second barrier to effective organizational memory is that preserving documents, the usual approach to organizational memory, fails to preserve the context which gives the documents meaning. This is the very thing that allows them to be useful in the future when the context has changed. Because current notions of organizational memory are artifact-oriented, they focus on preserving, organizing, indexing, and retrieving only the formal knowledge as it is stored in documents and databases. Most knowledge work is performed in the quest for solutions to "wicked problems," problems for which there is no clear and agreed upon definition of the problem, and indeed in which the problem itself is apt to change over time. Wicked problem solving is characterized by making lots of assumptions, educated guesses, and decisions under conditions of uncertainty. Decisions must often be revised or even retracted. In contrast with the linear techniques that have been adequate for solving "tame" problems, wicked problems require both traditional linear techniques and a heavy dose of social interactions, such as conversations, meetings, presentations, phone calls, and email.

Hypertext Functionality as Enabling Technology

Hypertext concerns structuring and accessing information in terms of its interrelationships. Hypertext allows information to be structured in a non-linear manner in order to better provide context, comprehension and relationship management. Developers have been building hypertext systems for over 30 years; the World Wide Web and HTML currently implement a small subset of these structuring and navigational features. The terms hypertext and hypermedia are synonymous - both apply relationships and navigation to information presented in all media.

The Hypertext Functionality Workshops address all aspects of providing hypertext functionality to software systems which do not have it. The workshops focus 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.

Organizational Memory and Hypertext Functionality

The Hypertext Functionality Workshops encourage a cross-disciplinary approach to addressing the problems of supporting hypertext functionality. Our aim is to bring together researchers from a number of relevant fields in order to bring a variety of perspectives. This cross-disciplinary environment fosters the exchange of useful ideas and promotes collaboration and cooperation among researchers in different fields.

Organizational memory research often refers to hypertext technology as a means of implementing organizational memory systems (OMS). Still, many specialised systems are designed with little or no hypertext functionality, yet there are many that can benefit from it. The primary interests of this workshop are all aspects of providing hypertext functionality to organizational memory systems. This workshop emphasizes two special aspects in relation to this:

The integration of hypertext features into organizational memory systems. Instead of introducing new hypertext-based tools or environments, there should be a means of enhancing existing information systems with the desired hypertext features. Hypertext features both supplement and give users access to the application's primary activities.

The investigation of organizational memory systems, which were not designed specifically as hypertext-oriented, through hypertext functionality 'eye-glasses'. 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.

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following:

Activities

HTF7 is a one-and-half-day event being held at December 12-13, 1998. Pre-workshop activities include the distribution of the papers via the World Wide Web. All participants are expected to have read the papers before the workshop. The papers will also appear as a Proceedings in the research papers series of the University of Oulu. Discussion topics will be finalised after assessing the contributions of the invited participants.

Participation

The number of participants will be between 20-25. The aim is to have representatives from all relevant 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. The fee for participation will be about 90 USD.

Submissions

All interested parties are invited to submit a full paper or 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 full paper of 4000-6000 words or a position paper of 500-2000 words in length to the Program Chair (Kari.Kuutti@oulu.fi). HTML is the desired format, but submissions may be in RTF, Postscript or plain ASCII are welcome. Each paper will be refereed and results will be emailed to authors. Authors of accepted papers may be asked to make some changes and the final, formatted version will have to be submitted to the Program Chair by the required date. All papers will be posted on the Web, so the final paper must be in a Web displayable format.

Important dates are:

Conference Committee

General Chair

Harri Oinas-Kukkonen, University of Oulu, Finland

Program Chair

Kari Kuutti, University of Oulu, Finland

Organizing Chair

Jaakko Virkkunen, University of Helsinki, Finland

Program Committee

Mark Ackerman, University of California Irvine, USA
Helen Ashman, University of Nottingham, UK
V. Balasubramarian, E-Papyrus, Inc., USA
Liam Bannon, University of Limerick, Ireland
Richard Bentley, Xerox Research Center, Cambridge, UK
Michael Bieber, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA
Guy Boy, EURISCO, France
Simon Buckingham Shum, The Open University, UK
Jeff Conklin, Group Decision Support Systems, USA
Allan McLean, Xerox Research Center, Cambridge, UK
Wolfgang Prinz, GMD-FIT, Germany
Albert M. Selvin, Bell Atlantic Corporation, USA
Ilkka Tervonen, University of Oulu, Finland
Randall Trigg, Xerox Research Center, Palo Alto, USA
Ilkka Tuomi, Nokia Research Center, Finland

Advisory Board

Helen Ashman, University of Nottingham, UK
V. Balasubramarian, E-Papyrus, Inc., USA
Michael Bieber, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA
Harri Oinas-Kukkonen, University of Oulu, Finland