Timeliner at KMEL 2011

Timeliner: Supporting Collaborative Scientific Writing

Vladimir TombergDavid Lamas

Mart Laanpere

KMEL 2011, Hong Kong – December 09, 2011

Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere 2

Intention to Write Scientific Paper

December 2011


Nature of Scientific Writing Today

"Any issue of Nature today has nearly the same number of Articles and Letters as one from 1950, but about four times as many authors"

Galegher et all (Ed.) Intellectual Teamwork: Social and Technological Foundations of Cooperative Work, Erlbaum, 1990

December 2011


Collaborative Writing Issues

• Finding right target (conference, journal);• Finding right partners (bottom-up approach);• Organizing “Personal Writing Environment”;• Planning and managing collaborative writing

process

December 2011

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How we plan collaborative writing?

December 2011 Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere

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Research question: what are the existing collaborative writing patterns today among

researchers?



Initial Survey

• Was conducted among twelve researchers in Tallinn University (Estonia) and Simon Frasier University (Canada);

• Followed by two design iterations:1. Defining project boundaries using activity-

centered design approach;2. Identifying expected affordances using user-

centered design approach

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Defining Project Boundaries

• Cooperatively identifying and tracking scientific publication opportunities;

• Contributing to an open research environment– Promoting awareness of shared goals– Supporting team work

• Managing writing tasks with a decentralized and light project management approach: resources mostly are kept in web-services;



December 2011

Results Collected from Activity-centered Design Study

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CfP

• CfP is most common catalyst for starting writing;• Usually it is gathered from different sources (WikiCfP,

RSS, other sources),• Includes important key dates for a project (deadlines,

milestones);• Has a diversity of types of deadlines;

• Problem: absence of suitable ontology for describing modern call for papers


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Call Ontology

• Proposed in framework of Timeliner research;• Based on several existing ontologies: DERI CfP,

ESWC2006 Conference Ontology, Foaf, Time, Dublin Core, Bibo;

• Describes concepts for events, submissions, dates, publications, people, and organizations;

• Described in paper “Towards a Comprehensive Call Ontology for Research 2.0” Tomberg, Lamas, Laanpere, Reinhard, Jovanovic (RDSRP 2011)


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Designing Timeliner: a tool for supporting collaborative scientific

writing



Task and Activities of Collaborative Writing (adapted from Curtis & Lowry, 2004)

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Inspiring ideas

• The “paper prototype” – real device



Inspiring ideas http://connectdesign.co.kr

December 2011

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Inspiring ideashttp://miniplan.ru


…and software implementation

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Our idea

• Unwrapping the clock ring…


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Our idea• Adding layers for targeted papers, resources

and community…



Supporting Collaborative Writing

• … by recommending the peers and CfP• … by linking the relevant resources• … by monitoring the contributions from peers

December 2011


First Design Mock-up

December 2011

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Resources Used in Projects

• Data we usually working with in our projects:– Goals and tasks, papers, notes, bookmarks, text

documents, pictures, and so on• Such data today can be stored as locally, as

well as in online web services



Timeliner Architecture

December 2011


The next steps

• Back to the field – evaluation of scenarios and paper prototypes in participatory design sessions (in process)

• Development of the working software prototype

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Thanks for your time!

[email protected]@tlu.ee

[email protected]


mailto:[email protected]



Education

Timeliner at KMEL 2011