Active Documents: the Future of Interactive E-Learning

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Active Documents the Future of Interactive
E-Learning

• Christinger Tomer Susan Alman
• School of Information Sciences
• University of Pittsburgh

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Goals of This Presentation

• Review Key Concepts and Issues in the
  Development of Active Documents
• Measure Progress Toward Implementation
• Assess Implications for Asynchronous Learning

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Conceptual Basis for Active Documents

• The notion of active documents embraces a number
  of interrelated design concepts
• Each concept is founded on the notion that device
  independent Web content engineering requires
  context-aware presentation methods to optimize
  the design of a presentation that suits the
  specific requirements of the user's delivery
  context.

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Characteristics of Active Documents

• The next generation of digital documents,
  including e-books, will be active, in the sense
  that they will include or be linked to executable
  code and data sets designed to produce dynamic
  renderings they will be network-aware, in the
  sense that they will have components that are
  updated (automatically or manually) via remote,
  Web-based facilities and they will support
  multiple-level annotation. This new, active
  document will be a collection of digital objects,
  assembled, ordered, and correlated to support
  communication and learning. It is based on
  notions of information ecology and artifact-based
  interactions and information artifacts as
  triggers of correlated functions.

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Movements in the Learning Object Economy

• A common conceptual definition of learning
  objects has yet to emerge, but there is a broad
  understanding within the e-learning community
  about the functional requirements of learning
  objects, incorporating the following ideas
• Accessibility the learning object should be
  tagged with metadata in order to be stored and
  referenced in a database.
• Reusability the learning object should be able
  to function in different instructional contexts.
• Interoperability the learning object should be
  independent of both the delivery media and
  knowledge management systems.

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Types of Active Document Systems under Development

• Multivalent Documents
• Propertied Document Systems
• Smart Style Layers
• Document-to Document Communications and
  Relationships
• Just-in-Time Documents

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What is a Multivalent Document?

• As defined by Wilensky and Phelps, a multivalent
  document is a set of (possibly distributed)
  layers and behaviors, denoting a documents
  contents and its functionality, respectively.

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Multivalent Document Architecture

• An extension mechanism behaviors
• modular, small or large, reusable, writeable
  program units.
• A document tree core data structure
• composed from multiple, distributed layers of
  related information
• flexible enough to handle diverse formats
• Low-level communication protocols
• to allow behaviors access to arbitrary document
  activities, but still compose without conflict
• Higher-level semantic events
• to allow behaviors to readily participate in
  logical document activities.
• A behavior management scheme hubs
• to give every document a custom browser

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Internal View of Multivalent Document as a Graph
annotation root
table root
section1
section3
section2
base root
section1
section2
section3
section2
p1
p2
p3
p4
table
col1
col2
line
line
line
w
w
w
w
w
w
text
image
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User Applications of Multivalent Documents

• User Annotations
• Geographic Information Systems
• Video Subtitling

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Layers of Content

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The Notion of the Smart Style Layer (Documents of
the Semantic Web)

• Content is selected structured
• Mappings are defined to a new presentation
  structure
• Styles (such as color and font) can be applied
• The transformation process is linear and assumes
  that Content/document structure, presentation
  structure and style are independent of each
  other.

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Multiple Generations of Web Documents

• Hand-coded HTML Content
• The Surface Web
• easy access through uniform interface
• huge authoring and maintenance effort
• hard to deal with dynamically changing content
• Automated, on the fly content generation
• The Deep Web
• based on templates filled with database content
• later extended with XML document transformations
• Automated processing of content
• The Semantic Web
• explicit meta-data instead of screen scraping
• agreed upon semantics

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Smart Style Layer from a Document Engineering
Perspective
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Internal Design Relationships
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Graphic Design Perspective

• Presentation structure, content and style depend
  on one another.
• Spatio-temporal layout gives meaning to the
  presentation (in contrast to the "linear" nature
  of text-flow).

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What are Propertied Document Systems?

• Propertied Document Systems are documents that
  have properties attached to them, including
  properties that encode the natural features of
  document use (e.g., an allied navigational
  scheme) and may also include images, executable
  code, and links to other documents.

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General Characteristics of the Propertied
Document Models

• Focus on scalability, security, reliability, and
  other consequences for interactive experience,
  assuming a distributed, federated architecture of
  "placeless documents" and property-based
  management, i.e., using active properties to
  track changes to documents, including creation of
  audit trails, notification of collaborators,
  links to network document services (e.g., e.g.
  translation, summarization, format conversion,
  image analysis, etc.), as well as exerting
  processing control -- e.g., backup,
  synchronization, updating, communication by
  email, etc.

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Functionality of Propertied Document Systems

• track changes to documents
• creating audit trails, notifying collaborators,
  maintaining consistency
• add new functionality to documents
• link to networked document services e.g.
  translation, summarization, format conversion,
  image analysis
• control document system behavior
• control caching, versioning, storage

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Benefits of Active Documents Based on Propertied
Document Systems

• associate behavior directly with documents
• independent of repositories
• apply behaviors to any document (e.g., email
  (IMAP) web (HTTP) files (NFS, NTFS)
• independent of applications, i.e., organize
  around tasks rather than applications

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Presto Document System at Xerox PARC Organized
by Properties as Opposed to Location
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Base Document References to Other Documents
(allowing each user a separate set of properties
for the same base document)
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Layered definitions of the structure of a
property value space (hierarchical structure
composed of a sequence of layered modifications)
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Propertied Document Systems and the Smart Style
Layer versus Multivalent Documents

• At the conceptual level, propertied document
  systems differ from multivalent documents and
  resemble the smart style layer insofar as the
  "behaviors" are associated directly with the
  documents, thus creating collections of documents
  that are effectively independent of applications
  and therefore may be organized around tasks
  rather than applications.

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Document-to-Document Relationships

• Documents are viewed as nodes in a dynamic
  network, or ontologically structured information
  space, in which documents and the connections
  among documents are interactive for example, if
  a new document is placed within the information
  space, other relevant documents, including linked
  documents, are updated to reflect the existence
  and content of the new document. A related scheme
  proposes to embed formalized knowledge models in
  active documents, effectively augmenting the
  types of information conveyed in printed
  documents and static electronic documents by
  cited sources.

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The Possibilities of Just-in-Time Documents

• In an environment where standardized metadata is
  common, search-and-retrieval engines driven by
  ontological schemes should be able to compose
  relevant documents on the fly, bringing a new
  dimension to the idea of the subject search.

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Conclusions Active Documents and Asynchronous
Learning

• Positive Richer and More Efficient Systems of
  Document-Based Communication, wherein multimedia
  documents based on object-oriented design can be
  composed and/or retasked to meet specific needs
  by authors and/or users
• Negative Complex learning environment in which
  common learning experiences based on exposure to
  the same set of documents may be diminished
  substantially.

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Major Issues in the Use of Active Document Schema

• Intellectual Property and Rights Management
• Security
• Authenticity/Validation
• Continuity

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Key Factors in the Continued Development/Implement
ation of Active Document Systems

• Availability of computing cycles (and the
  relevance of grid computing schemes)
• Bandwidth
• Broad-based use of metadata tagging
• Implementation of a handle system to support
  standardized naming and ensure persistence
• Development of easy-to use authoring tools

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Key Information Sources

• Heinrich, Eva, and Hermann Maurer. Active
  Documents Concept, Implementation and
  Applications. Journal of Universal Computer
  Science 6 (2000). URL http//www.jucs.org/jucs_6_
  12/active_documents_concept_implementation.
• Dix, Alan. The Ecology of Interaction. URL
  http//www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/dixa/t
  opics/ecology/.
• van Ossenbruggen, Jacco. Towards Semantic Web
  Document Engineering. Amsterdam Centrum voor
  Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), 2002. URL
  http//www.w3.org/2002/02/DIWS/submission/jvanosse
  nbruggen-position.html.
• Phelps, Thomas A. and Robert Wilensky. The
  Multivalent Browser A Platform for New Ideas.
  Proceedings of Document Engineering 2001,
  November 2001, Atlanta, Georgia. URL
  http//www.cs.berkeley.edu/phelps/Multivalent/.

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Acknowledgements
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Acknowledgements

• Several of the slides presented herein have
  adapted, with modifications, from works of Jacco
  van Ossenbruggen and Robert Wilensky. Those
  slides are used for the purposes of illustration
  only.