Cross-Media Document Linking and Navigation

Presentation given at DocEng 2018, 18th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, Halifax, Canada.

ABSTRACT: Documents do often not exist in isolation but are implicitly or explicitly linked to parts of other documents. However, due
to a multitude of proprietary document formats with rather simple link models, today’s possibilities for creating hyperlinks between snippets of information in different document formats are limited. In previous work, we have presented a dynamically extensible cross-document link service overcoming the limitations of the simple link models supported by most existing document formats. Based on a plug-in mechanism,
our link service enables the linking across different document types. In this paper, we assess the extensibility of our link service by integrating some document formats as well as third-party document viewers. We illustrate the flexibility of creating advanced hyperlinks across these document formats and viewers that cannot be realised with existing linking solutions or link models of existing document formats. A user study further investigates the user experience when creating and navigating cross-document hyperlinks.

Research paper: https://beatsigner.com/publications/cross-media-document-linking-and-navigation.pdf

Transcript

1. 2 December 2005 Cross-Media Document Linking and Navigation Ahmed A.O. Tayeh, Payam Ebrahimi and Beat Signer Web & Information Systems Engineering Lab Department of Computer Science Vrije Universiteit Brussel WEB & INFORMATION SYSTEMS ENGINEERING
2. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 2 August 30, 2018 Working With Documents ▪ 26% of reading and writing tasks include cross-document referencing ▪ Use of annotations and folders to create references ▪ 56% of knowledge workers not satisfied with existing mechanisms ▪ 75% of knowledge workers indicated the need for a tool to associate information
3. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 3 August 30, 2018 Missing Cross-Document Linking × × × Word document PDF document
4. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 4 August 30, 2018 Existing Support for Hyperlinks
5. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 5 August 30, 2018 Existing Hypermedia Systems ▪ Limited extensibility ▪ on the data as well as on the visual level ▪ Limited support of third-party viewers MADCOW: A Multimedia Digital Annotation System, Paolo Bottoni et al., In Proceedings of AVI 2004
6. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 6 August 30, 2018 DocFormat 1 DocFormat 2 C R U D Menu Gateways Link Model DocFormat 1 Gateways Data Plug-ins Visual Plug-ins Add-ins DocFormat 2 DocFormat 3 Database Add-in Gateway DocFormat 3 Third-party document viewer DocFormat 3 Data plug-ins Visual plug-in Visual plug-in Developer End user Link browser write and upload plug-ins and add-ins search and download plug-ins and add-ins visualise documents, create, navigate and edit hyperlinks Link service Communication Channels Plug-in tracking Gateway ... Gateway plug-ins RESTful API search and retrieve plug-ins Online Plug-in Repository
7. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 7 August 30, 2018 Visual Plug-ins
8. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 8 August 30, 2018 Extensibility Usability Evaluation 1. Integration of a number of document formats ▪ link browser - PDF, XML, plain text and images ▪ third-party document viewers - Google Chrome, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint 2. How easy can other document formats be integrated? 3. End-user usability study
9. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 9 August 30, 2018 Plain Text and PDF
10. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 10 August 30, 2018 HTML
11. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 11 August 30, 2018 YouTube
12. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 12 August 30, 2018 Microsoft Word and PowerPoint
13. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 13 August 30, 2018 Images
14. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 14 August 30, 2018 XML
15. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 15 August 30, 2018 How Easy Can Other Formats be Integrated? ▪ Visualisation in link browser ▪ available Java library ▪ definition of selectors ▪ visualisation of selectors ▪ Visualisation in third-party viewer ▪ extensible viewer ▪ definition of selectors ▪ visualisation of selectors ▪ support of communication channel
16. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 16 August 30, 2018 Visualisation in Link Browser
17. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 17 August 30, 2018 Visualisation in Third-Party Viewer
18. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 18 August 30, 2018 End-User Evaluation ▪ Mixed method approach ▪ 14 participants (7 males) aged between 23 and 37 (M=27) ▪ non-computer scientists (from VUB) ▪ Quantitative evaluation ▪ CSUQ questionnaire with 19 questions evaluating four different usability aspects - ease of use (SYSUSE) - information quality (INFOQUAL) - interface quality (INTERQUAL) - overall satisfaction (OVERALL) ▪ Qualitative evaluation via semi-structured interviews
19. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 19 August 30, 2018 Setup ▪ Only two document formats (plain text and Word) ▪ Brief explanation of study objectives ▪ Explanation of supported functionality ▪ Participants had to perform a number of tasks ▪ creating, navigating, deleting and editing of bi- and multidirectional hyperlinks ▪ extend the link service to support PDF and HTML ▪ creating and navigating multidirectional hyperlinks between the four document formats ▪ Questionnaire followed by a semi-structured interview
20. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 20 August 30, 2018 Quantitative Results
21. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 21 August 30, 2018 Aspects to be Improved ▪ Participants confused about hyperlink sources and targets ▪ Avoid technical concepts ▪ Avoid confusion in third-party viewer ▪ Provide explanations (manuals) via videos
22. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 22 August 30, 2018 Conclusions ▪ Contributions ▪ technical evaluation with a number of document formats - PDF, plain text, XML, images - Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, Google Chrome, YouTube ▪ technical evaluation of extensibility with other document formats ▪ initial end-user evaluation ▪ Future Work ▪ integration of additional document formats ▪ user study with third-party developers ▪ manageability and maintainability of hyperlinks
23. Ahmed A.O. Tayeh - Department of Computer Science - atayeh@vub.be 23 August 30, 2018 References ▪ A.A.O. Tayeh, P. Ebrahimi and B. Signer, Cross-Media Document Linking and Navigation, Proceedings of the 18th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering (DocEng 2018), Halifax, Canada, August 2018 ▪ http://beatsigner.com/publications/tayeh_DocEng2018.pdf