Context-Baed Authoring and Management of Documents.doc

Context-Based Authoring and Management of Documents Laurent Kirsch, Jean Botev and Steffen Rothkugel Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication University of Luxembourg L-1359 Luxembourg Email:{laurent.kirsch, jean.botev, steffen.rothkugel}@uni.lu Abstract: Current systems for authoring and managing documents face many limitations in terms of user support for viewing, creating, editing and organizing information in a context-based fashion.This paper presents a novel environment that enables advanced context-based handling of information, integrating concepts and methods from activity-based and temporal models over faceted search to inter-document connections. The suggested environment supports semantic connections not only between entire documents, but also user-defined excerpts. A novel approach to presenting these connections allows for the automatic grouping of related elements and for easily accessing and editing these in their entirety. Further abstractions supporting the time-based organization of documents, excerpts and their semantic interconnections by lines of work are also introduced and discussed. These concepts are realized in a prototypical implementation to verify their practicability and usefulness. 1 Introduction Document authoring and management involves information from multiple contexts. University professors, for instance, create slide shows and exams, write conference papers and journal articles, but also have to deal with documents related to the management of their research team. To avoid information overload and the resulting stress situations for the user (Farhoomand, 2002), it is important to organize documents according to their semantic context (Katifori, 2005, Cai, 2005), both in terms of persistent location and on-screen position of open instances. Moreover, contextual connections not only between entire documents, but also their excerpts – both within and across document boundaries – allow for better grasping the interre