Interweaving objects, types and people

ABSTRACT

This position paper reflects a line of research that focuses on patterns of human activity over time. We aim to fit, show and support human activity via a rich record of people's motion amongst information, tools, other people, and space. We have built tools that track activity in the web and local files, and are now extending them to track motion amongst the streets of the city and the artifacts of a local museum. They make recommendations for movement and selection that are specific to the ongoing context of each user. Our intention is to treat physical and electronic objects as uniformly as possible, concentrating on their similarities as information bearing entities, rather than on their different characteristic media. A higher-level aim is to build systems that conform to contemporary models of language and semiology, that offer a unifying view of information based on its role in human activity and interpretation.

REFERENCES

• 1: Matthew Chalmers , Kerry Rodden , Dominique Brodbeck, The order of things: activity-centered information access, Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web 7, p.359-367, April 1998, Brisbane, Australia
• 2: Chalmers, M. Informatics, Architecture and Language, in Social Navigation in Information Space, Munro, A., Hook, K. & Benyon, D. (eds.), Springer, 1999.
• 3: Matthew Chalmers, Comparing information access approaches, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, v.50 n.12, p.1108-1118, Oct. 1999 [doi>10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:12<1108::AID-ASI10>3.0.CO;2-S]
• 4: Steve Harrison , Paul Dourish, Re-place-ing space: the roles of place and space in collaborative systems, Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.67-76, November 16-20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/240080.240193]
• 5: Hillier, B. Space is the Machine, Cambridge U. Press, 1996.
• 6: Paul Resnick , Hal R. Varian, Recommender systems, Communications of the ACM, v.40 n.3, p.56-58, March 1997 [doi>10.1145/245108.245121]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
          Subjects: Artificial, augmented, and virtual realities

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.7 Three-Dimensional Graphics and Realism
          Subjects: Virtual reality

General Terms:
Design, Management, Performance, Theory

Keywords:
context, guides, heterogeneous data, path systems, recommender systems, semiology