CSCI 6448

Webguide Proposal

The Webguide is an educational application over the Internet that aims to help students to collectively do web-research, organize materials collected and share them with other students. The Webguide environment creates a shared information space, which supports team group through perspective and negotiation mechanisms.

The goal of the project for the CSCI-6448 class is to develop the perspective and negotiation concepts, and implement in Java (if it is possible) the perspective and negotiation classes and beams. The perspective mechanism is based on the idea of inheritance. "The term perspective means that a particular, restricted segment of the information source is being considered, stored, categorized, and annotated. In the realm of collaborative work, it is important to intertwine these personal perspectives with each other. An individual can do this by taking into account the perspectives of others or by adopting part of another person's perspective within one's own. It is also possible to merge several perspectives into one common one. We explore the possibility of providing computer support for intertwining perspectives for use in collaborative work [Stahl et al., see paper on the website]." Negotiation, on the other hand, allows users to collaboratively come up with a team perspective. It will then be used in the Webguide application and applet, and will hopefully allow other researchers to implement those kinds of concept and mechanism in their applications.

For more information please have a look at the following site:

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerry/WebGuide/webguide.htm

And paper:

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~gerry/HomePage/Publications/Intertwining