ISeeYou - a tool for contextualising information on the World-Wide Web

ISeeYou was developed to investigate the idea that making contextual information explicitly available to a user helps them identify information relevant to their current information need. It is a proof-of-concept implementation based on the Identify-Collect-Use (ICU) Framework developed in my PhD research. This framework was developed to support the identification, collection and use of contextual information. Its usefulness for people seeking information on the web was evaluated using a usability study, and it was found to be perceived as useful and easy-to-use. ISeeYou consists of three software components, one for each activity that makes up the ICU framework.

The first component, identifyApp, is an implementation of an Identify component. It is implemented as a Browser Helper Object using C++ and ATL. It is loaded by Internet Explorer and monitors the user behaviour using the DWebBrowserEvents2 dispatch interface. Contextual information recognised by the identifyApp is encoded in a SOAP message and sent to the collectApp.

The second component is an implementation of a Collect component, collectApp. The collectApp component is implemented in Java. It publishes a set of Web Services using SOAP. These interfaces are used by distributed components to update and query the collection of contextual information. The contextual information is persisted using Prevayler. This results in a fast implementation as all the information is available in memory, but as the dataset grows the memory footprint becomes significantly large. The next iteration of the collectApp will use a lightweight embedded database solution.

The third component, useApp, is an implementation of a Use component. It is implemented as an Explorer Band for Internet Explorer using C++ and ATL. The user interface is provided using HTML. Contextual information retrieved from the collectApp is encoded using XML. The XML is run through an XSLT script to generate HTML that is presented to the user. This allows the user interface to be easily modified or customised as data elements are changed or added, and as new user interface (UI) techniques are identified as being useful to the user. The contextual information is retrieved by sending SOAP-based queries to the collectApp when changes in the content being displayed are detected, or when the user selects a new option in the Explorer Band.

In the first implementation it was assumed that the collectApp is running on the same machine as the identifyApp and storeApp. It is envisaged that collectApps can be shared by communities of users and that contextual information can be shared as a form of collective intelligence. This will be a focus of future implementations.

The usability evaluation showed that ISeeYou was perceived by users to be useful and easy-to-use when carrying out information-seeking behaviours. This result encourages further development of the tool. The implementation developed for the usability study was developed as a proof of concept and had a minimal feature set and was not designed to be robust or scalable. Additionally, a decision was made to only implement support for Internet Explorer. This constraint was imposed to make the implementation schedule manageable. There is no reason identifyApp and useApp components for FireFox cannot be developed, and this is another focus of future implementations. A final issue for future implementation is to decouple useApp’s from the web browser. This decoupling is readily supported by the use of SOAP for communication between components.

Future work on a production system will focus on providing a richer experience, integrating community contextual information, a broader set of identifyApps and useApps, and using a robust scalable implementation that can be rolled out across the Web. This will move ISeeYou from being a research tool to being a widely used tool that augments peoples information-seeking behaviours by providing contextual information that helps people select, search and filter information on the Web.

Comments

[Steve Barnett]

Dr Bucknell,

This is very impressive. Thankyou for sharing.

[Adamand Godson]

Please e-mail me your contacts!
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