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Authoring Tools

Jim Foley & Tomasz Imielinski

Authoring (creating) material to be presented in an information space involves at least three inter- related, overlapping, and non-sequential activities:

Basic authoring tools are becoming available: they tend to concentrate on layout, with little assistance for overall logical structuring. They generally take the reasonable approach of using existing graphic and text editors for developing content. None of the current or envisioned tools actively help the author, nor do they facilitate or encourage innovation.

Recommendation 1: Knowledgeable Authoring Tools

Support research to develop authoring tools which actively help and encourage the author to create good material. Just as word-processors support writing with spell-checkers and grammar checkers, so should authoring tools help with the authoring task. But, because Web pages are (or can be) more highly structured than text, the support for authoring can be at a much more sophisticated level than spell and grammar checking.

One example of this is in the domain of education. Much is known about how to structure effective educational presentations: using examples to illustrate or to motivate principles; using counter-examples to explain categorizations or an exception to a rule, etc. This leads to the notion of "pedagogically- informed authoring tools" for creating Web content, wherein good educational practices are embedded in the tools in such a way as to make it easy to do things pedagogically well, and to make it hard to do things pedagogically poorly. This philosophy is already used in some experimental user interface design tools which can critique a design, [Foley 89] and should be extended to Web authoring tools.

As with the visualization research issues, having a rich semantic description is as well an essential ingredient for this work.

Recommendation 2: Active Papers and their Authoring Tools

One concept for educational and information-sharing use of the Web is that of active papers, papers which can be visualized, rendered, explained and tested. Active papers are not static but rather are snapshots of the evolving experimental research which allow the "readers" to follow the footsteps of the authors by recreating the reported experiments and even modifying them. Active papers can use visualization and speech and can be queried by the interface which is specific to the paper content. Therefore, the active paper is a time- evolving process and reading such a paper involves not only querying its current content but also monitoring its future. Active papers provide the readers with the possibility of interacting with the content of the paper using the interface provided by the author (in the same way as she now provides the table of contents). In this way, each paper becomes a "database" which can be queried and even, in some cases, updated. As in databases, different views can be defined for the same paper: For example one can create "presentation views" for talks of different length and depth including high level (possibly visual) abstracts of "what the paper is about?"

The active paper will be only a snapshot of the ongoing research process. Active papers will be extensible both by authors (producing new versions) and by other scientists by producing active hyperlinks. Thus reading the active paper will involve also monitoring the "follow up" changes made to it. An issue closely related to this is the refereeing of such active papers. NSF and professional societies can be instrumental in this by establishing central repositories or databases of pointers (URLs) to active papers. Admission of active papers to such repositories would be contingent on periodic peer review.

References

Foley J., Kim W., Kovacevic S., & Murray K. (1989) The User Interface Design Environment - A Computer Aided Software Engineering Tool for the User-Computer Interface. IEEE Software, Special Issue on User Interface Software, 6(1), pp.25-32.

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