As We May Work Andy van Dam Brown University April 17, 2008

As We May WorkAndy van Dam

Brown UniversityApril 17, 2008

Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2008 Tokyo – April 17, 2008 2

Roadmap

My personal and selective history of hypertext from Vannevar Bush's Memex to Engelbart's NLS/Augment to Brown's HES/FRESS/IGD and Intermedia to Tim Berners-Lee's WWW

The age of the traditional WWW Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 Traction TeamPage example Speculations on the future of Enterprise 2.0 what facilities are still missing what is needed to provide them


Vannevar Bush – As We May Think

purpose: to cope with information explosion

personal use microfilm-based, multi-media

associative trails and professional trail blazers

Memex (1945)"As We May Think", Vannevar Bush in The Atlantic Monthly, 1945


Memex – antecedents

Western religious commentaries

Renga and BashoJapanese linked poetry


Engelbart's NLS (oNLine System) - 1968





"Mother of All Demos" (1968) Bush's vision influenced Engelbart to devote his career to augmentation of human intellect gestation since 1951 forerunners of NLS in the mid-60's

Focus – collaborative work groups Technologies introduced

mini-computer + video terminals with mouse, keyboard

collaboration tools for co-located as well distributed groupso simultaneous voice and screen sharingo chalk-passing protocol for control of cursor


My personal history - overview

Brown University projects 1967: HES (Hypertext Editing System)

o partnership with Ted Nelson

1968: FRESS (File Retrieval and Editing System)o influenced by HES and Engelbart's NLS

1979: IGD (Interactive Graphical Documents)

1982: Intermedia

1990: EBT (Electronic Book Technologies) 1995: Brown/MIT Bush Symposium in honor of 50th Anniversary of "As We May Think"


HES (Hypertext Editing System) - 1967



Inspired by Theodor Nelson's vision of hypertext

Ted as co-designer

Experiment with non-linear information structures

based on fine-grained links

e.g. cross-linked database of electro-plating patents

Read/write tool, no access controls



Simple graphical interface commands provided via simple function keypad.

insertion points and character strings indicated with light pen

Produced NASA Apollo documentation Expensive System 360/50 mainframe hardware

with expensive IBM 2250 vector display

thus single user


FRESS (File Retrieval&Editing System)-1968 Influenced by HES and Engelbart's NLS

information structureso preserved HES's arbitrary length text o fine-grained links now bi-directional and taggedo completely difference data structures for scalability

user interfaceo vector graphics, soft fonts, e.g., Greeko added NLS-style hierarchy, and access and viewing controls ("view specs") down to the character level

o supported both a primitive GUI and an NLS-like command language for less capable terminals

intrinsically multi-user via time-sharing system and cheap terminals

Used in production in a variety of courses and projects


FRESS (File Retrieval&Editing System)-1968 Influenced by HES and Engelbart's NLS

information structureso preserved HES's arbitrary length text o plus optional NLS-style hierarchyo fine-grained links now bi-directional and taggedo emphasis on scalability, e.g., new data structure

user interfaceo both a primitive GUI, and for less capable terminals, an NLS-like command language

o access and viewing controls ("view specs") down to character level

o vector graphics, soft fonts, e.g., Greek intrinsically multi-user

o time-sharing system and cheap terminals


FRESS (File Retrieval&Editing System)-1968

Used in production in a variety of courses and projects

1975 - used in a course on "Man, Energy, and Environment" sponsored by Exxon

1976 - used in a course on the critical analysis of British and American poetry sponsored by NEH (National Endowment for Humanities)

rich interlinked corpus of poetry, professional criticism, and student commentary based on hundreds of source documents

First online collaborative scholarly community every student and instructor read and commented on everyone else's online analyses


IGD (Interactive Graphical Documents)-1979




Inverted the text focus of HES and FRESS emphasized

o overviews with directed graphs of page icons

o simple animations

o automatically generated timelines, tag lists for visual searching

Oriented towards online e-books primarily for technical documentation, e.g., sonar systems

Context-sensitive links and trails access control history



Intermedia – IRIS (Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship) - 1982


Object-oriented on all levels arbitrary nesting of objects

Separate link database allowed multiple link sets ("webs") over same content

Unix-style access control person-group-world: read-write-execute

Used in multiple courses cell biology planetary geology Context 32 (a literature course) ...

Intermedia – IRIS (Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship) - 1982


EBT (Electronic Book Technologies) - 1990


Spinout from Brown University Combined two previously unconnected technologies hypertext

SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language)

Commercial product focused on real-world needs of groups, e.g., Boeing

production and use of technical documentation

stylesheet-driven behavior and appearance DynaText- standalone reader DynaBase – content management platform DynaWeb – browser-based reader

EBT (Electronic Book Technologies) - 1990EBT (Electronic Book Technologies) - 1990


Summary of pre-WWW contributions

Non-linear & multi-media information structures branching trails within bi-directional graphs, even hierarchies...

bi-directional, fine-grained, tagged links conditional links

Read/write interactive user interfaces Access & viewing controls Multi-user Metadata

However: all were closed systems!


The age of the traditional WWW – 1991

Strengths from the beginning

from closed systems to open and universal access

scalability

textual links you can edit and email

a platform that makes it possible to build search engines and other apps over WWW. no one had to ask permission.

much lower cost of entry for application development


Strengths from the beginning open and universal access

scalability

textual links that can be edited and emailed

universal development platformo Web-centric crawlers, search engines, and applications

o much more lightweight, agile development

therefore, much lower cost of entry for application development o enables ASPs (Application Services Providers)




Weaknesses read-only; authoring became a form of programming

o HTML lost the huge advantage of SGML's generality, e.g. locked into predefined tag set

XML can be thought of as modern SGML

page-replace to follow a link; no visualization of "you are here"

non-permanent and thus fragile (the dreaded 404!)

Note: some of these limitations are browser limitations rather than intrinsic


Weaknesses read-only + forms

authoring became a form of programmingo HTML lost the huge advantage of SGML's generality

locked into predefined tag set

XML can be thought of as modern SGML

links as unconditional & uni-directional 'goto' pointers

loss of context - no visualization of "you are here"

non-permanent and thus fragile (the dreaded 404!)

Note: some of these limitations are browser limitations rather than intrinsic WWW limitations



Web 2.0 – "Back to the Future"


Web 2.0 - forces driving change

Technical WWW platform and applications pervade all areas of life lightweight interactive tools lower development barriers vs.

traditional transactional ERP suites

Social social network is THE incumbent technology for young adults

o "NextGen" lives on web and does instant communications open source movement collaborative and emergent (bottom-up) intelligence as change

drivers

Business employees expect their corporate environment to work like the web new communication tools lead to breakdown of traditional

hierarchyo virtual organizations emerge within old structures

niche markets become viable due web-based marketing – "long tail" design cycles accelerate; product lives measured in months crowdsourcing ("open innovation") experiments, e.g., Proctor and

Gamble


Web 2.0 –> Enterprise 2.0


tagging ("social bookmarking"), collaborative filtering, 3D virtual worlds, e.g., Second Life, multi-user online role-playing games, e.g., Lord of the Rings Online

Tools for users search engines aggregators, e.g., RSS news readers mashup tools, e.g., Google Mashup Editor, MSFT Popfly, Yahoo Pipes

web authoring, e.g., Adobe Creative Suite™, Microsoft Expression™

Google applications, e.g., Maps, gmail, ... and Google Apps Tools for developers

Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) for expression and UI Adobe Flex™ & Microsoft Silverlight™ web application frameworks

SOA (Service Oriented Architectures) for Web services

Web 2.0 - components

User experience blogs, wikis, social networking, e.g., MySpace, FaceBook, Mixi, and location-based mobile social networks, e.g., GyPSii


World Wide Telescope Features3D Earth, planets and panorama data sets

Links to image and data sources

Multiple wavelength sky image sets Simple rich media authoring across multiple image data sets

Seamless zooming and panning

Communities and KML support

Robotic telescope control

Gigapixel image panoramas


Web 2.0 provides: "capabilities" interaction – moving from passive read-only back to active medium

collaboration support

but also vulnerabilities: much use of the web is still "too trusting", e.g., wiki sabotage and cyberterrorism

Enterprise 2.0 needs: "guarantees" stable content and links – robustness

ability to work within boundaries – security

easier peer-to-peer awareness and collaboration - lateralization

Example: FRESS viewing and editing controls o an early (1972) example of boundaries and spaces, e.g. proposal = main body + summary budget + breakout pages with (elided) salaries

Web 2.0 Enterprise 2.0


Traction TeamPage example


Traction TeamPage example

Robust, secure, and linked 'spaces' interoperates with WWW

version control of internal structure

permanent content and links

wiki and weblog style editable hypertext in spaces

Spaces define boundaries for customer, partner, and internal group work spaces carry role-based and individual permission

search results, tag clouds, drill-down use permissions

provides global views over many active spaces


Future - what facilities are needed? (1/2)

Relationships among groups in business are important but difficult to visualize when entering a space (office, conference room, or auditorium)o you know who the audience is, and o you know how to interact, using many social and visual cues

should be just as clear and simple in social software systems

Enterprise 2.0 software designerso must learn to think more like architects, who design spaces for social purposes

but the Internet is much bigger (and more complex, even more potentially dangerous) than any physical building


Future - what facilities are needed? (2/2)

Data security and permanence corporate data critical to the survival of the enterprise

o heterogeneous combination of transactional and semi-structured data, e.g., databases, memos, email, white papers, websites, ...

Enterprise 2.0 activities must integrate traditional data Web-based SOA “applications” aggregate distributed functionalityo via WSDL (Web Services Description Language), XSD (XML schema), …

o dynamic, real-time data access

o interconnection of multiple heterogeneous data sources and functions

o but because of potential of introducing “exploits”, need guarantees!!!

Above all – ease of use!

legacy technology inertia very hard to overcome needs strong incentives to change


Future – what do we need to do to make it happen? Learn from historical experience and apply it

assign economic value to lessons learned

expect everyone to be able to write as well as read

develop simple, effective metaphors and models

Learn how to design well for group use to support very large numbers of groups (scalability!)

make social software easy to understand and use, safe

Educate students and teach employees in development and effective use of Web 2.0 tools

and applying Enterprise 2.0 principles

Enterprise 2.0 Summit 2008 Tokyo – April 17, 2008 38 38

“To Infinity and Beyond…”