A stake in cyberspace

Abstract

introductionConsider the information 'terrain' in which we browse and interact over the Internet, principally the World Wide Web but also USENET, email and IRC. This differs in several basic ways from the territory that we are used to:° We can be -and often want to be -in several places at once. °The information terrain is hard to navigate. It is infinite and heterogeneous. There are only rudimentary maps. It is in a state of flux, and is not sharply distinguished from the artefacts it sustains.• Currently we spend most of our time wandering alone where there is much evidence of human activity, but where the natives themselves and their tools are nowhere to be seen. When we do encounter others, we pass low-bandwidth messages back and forth, often knowing little about our interlocutors.The thesis of this position paper is:o The most useful notion of the terrain is the combination of users and the shared information that they interact with, not the information alone.• Information is where users should be able to encounter other users with similar interests. We need to support collaboration and other forms of social interaction between users, who either meet while browsing information or who are already members of a group..The key to collaborative information sharing and interaction on the Internet is the concept of boundary, which encompasses naming, security and integrity of shared data, and user communication and awareness. The navigation problem will not go away, but boundaries enable us to impose structure on the sprawl.We now present an early snapshot of a design that addresses these points. A framework for sharing objects across the InternetMushroom l [10] is a framework for collaboration and interaction across the Internet. This framework supports the dynamic creation and management of Mrooms, which are environments for collaborative activity and containers for shared objects. We give an overview of the users' model in this section, and go on to describe the system issues in the next section.Although we base our work on a 'room' metaphor [6,9], we recognise the need to provide a task-based representation of Mrooms. Users access Mrooms through links on World Wide Web pages, and they navigate between them by following links; however, access control is applied. In Mrooms, users can share applications and information objects such as documents, multimedia presentations and whiteboards. Users also share tools for awareness of and communication with other users in the Mroom. Mrooms are persistent, and users can either interact and communicate synchronously (in the same Mroom at the same time) or asynchronously (users occupy the Mroom at different times, but observe one another's changes to information objects). Objects within Mrooms may be active. For example, in distance-learning a lecturer may create interactive objects for student experiments. Equally, we can use Mrooms to store conventional objects such as PostScript files and word processing documents.

Towards a real-world wide web

“…filters) it as best it can. Similarly, in some event-based systems such as Mushroom [13], events are self-describing objects. Objects that react to events have a single notify(Event e) method, which the event service calls when an event occurs.…”