NGAIA:Main

From Grand Forum

NGAIA Mailing List

Contents

Project Name: Next Generation Information Appliances

Project Leader

Elaine Toms

Project Co-Leader

Charles Clarke

Researchers

Theme Distribution

Project Description

The use of information has always taken second place to the hard task of locating the right information in the first place. Over the past century, we have seen the search for information evolve from initially simply finding the likely container that the information might be found in, first through library card catalogues with their highly structured but limited access points, and later to full-text search systems provided first by publishers and more recently by web search engines. But along the way, all of these systems lost sight of the original purpose the ultimate use of that information, and facilitating that use.

Two people with the same problem might seek different information, two people might also find the same information useful for different problems, and the same two people may need to scrutinize that same information differently. The challenge lies in the development of new media applications to support the access to and use of information for context specific purposes. For example, we have a stove, microwave, toaster and barbeque to support our cooking processes even though they all share a common element, a type of heating technology. Analogically, we similarly need different types of tools new appliances to support our information processes from exploring and finding information, to examining and using it. The types of tools will differ by work or task domain. For example, what is needed for consumer health information will differ from that used by the citizen in consuming government information, or the scholar in using published/unpublished research (Hoppe & Shiele, 1992; Toms & O'Brien, 2008; Marchionini et al, 2009).

We hypothesize that different task environments require different types of tools, and it is that unique set of tools that will create novel task-specific information appliances. Our initial project will take place in the scholarly work environment. This is opportunistically taking advantage of a novel national information network for the humanities and social sciences that will provide a living laboratory complete with user community and unconstrained by the conditions typically found within the private enterprise. Over the course of this project, we will work additionally within other domains including consumer health particularly for chronic illness, access to and use of government information by citizens, and community-based local information. We envision multiple appliances emerging from this research. A core challenge is in identifying the common element while at the same time respecting the distinctions so that we wind up with tools that are fit for purpose. Integral to this project also is a challenge also to our design frameworks and to how we ultimately evaluate these appliances.

Excellence of the Research

Development of Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP)

interdisciplinary team from computer science, engineering, information science, psychology, communications mirrors the involvement and training of (undergrads, graduate and PDFs) who will be involved in this project. Success of this arrangement is predicted from the past successful collaboration among Toms, Clarke and Freund.

Networking and Partnerships

interdisciplinary team from computer science, engineering, information science, psychology, communications. Initial partner who will benefit from the research is a scholarly network who provides a working virtual laboratory for the development of requirements, development, implementation and evaluation. Lessons learned in this open source network will be applied to more restrictive environments in later years.

Knowledge and Technology Exchange and Exploitation

information at the point of decision-making has long been lamented as a failing of the garden hose delivery of web search engines. Lessons learned in our highly focused first project (even though it is a scholarly application) will have generalizability to many other types of applications such as patient-centric health services, citizen-centric government services, enterprise knowledge management and so on. [Note: Marti Hearst claimed at the SIGIR conference that research shows that it takes 10 years for a technology to become commercial]

References to the Literature

Hopp, H.U., & Schiele, F. (1992). Towards task models for embedded information retrieval. In CHI 92 Conference Proceedings: ACM conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 173180). New York: ACM.

Marchionini, G. et al. (2009). Information Seeking Support Systems. An invitational workshop sponsored by the National Science Foundation, June 26-27, 2008, Chapel Hill, NC USA (http://ils.unc.edu/ISSS/ISSS_final_report.pdf)

Toms, E.G. & OBrien, H.L. (2008). Understanding the information and communication technology needs of the e-humanist. Journal of Documentation 64(1), 102-130

Publications

Presentations



Page Rank: 48 / 100
Retrieved from "http://forum.grand-nce.ca/index.php/NGAIA:Main"