The Knowledge Management Research Group

Media projects / HK arbete

Background

Development in conceptual modeling it increasingly dealing with collaborative aspects. The KMR group therefore has put an effort on designing and developing a service and information directory, Collaborilla, for holding information that supports collaboration. This information is intended to be useful both in collaborative authoring processes as well as for exploring material that has been produced in a collaborative manner.

The Collaborilla directory can already be used from within the concept browser Conzilla, and will be fully integrated soon. Conzilla in combination with Collaborilla is planned to be used as a tool for collaborative conceptual modeling as well as a tool for advanced discourse management.

Project 1: Investigation of the Basics of Collaborative Conceptual Browsing

  1. Read up on conceptual browsing and related initiatives.
  2. Modify the conceptual browsing description so that it makes allowances for collaboratively built context maps.
  3. Investigate the browsing user interface and suggest improvements.
  4. Identify the key steps of the authoring process.
  5. Identify and describe a set of scenarios for collaborative authoring.
  6. Develop instructional material, for example:
a) Short and to the point descriptions of how conceptual browsing with collaboration works, to be used in help texts.
b) Develop a few example context maps that illustrate conceptual browsing with collaboration that can be understood by everybody.
c) Write some longer texts where the finer points of collaboration is discussed, to be used in a manual.

Project 2: Design of a Web-based GUI for Collaborative Conceptual Browsing

  1. Investigate existing web based conceptual mapping solutions, e.g. CmapTools and Compendium.
  2. Try to make an exhaustive description of possible user interaction workflows (*) for collaborative conceptual browsing in a web environment.
  3. Suggest a user interaction workflow and provide a careful motivation why.
  4. Describe the suggested workflow in such detail that it will be straightforward to implement it GUI-wise.
  5. Develop a UI-design and provide a simple proof of concept mockup in XHTML + CSS.
  6. (Optional) Develop a (non-functional) prototype using widgets of an appropriate Ajax toolkit (this might require an evaluation of available toolkits first).

(*) Possible elements of a user interaction workflow respectively graphical user interface:

  • Toolbars to easily access frequently used functionalities
  • Colors and/or icons to indicate special kinds of concepts (links, content attached, etc)
  • List of available contributions
  • Meta-data popups
  • Quick annotations to concepts
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