Interactions across the Paper-Digital Divide

Paper has been repeatedly recognised as an important medium for exchanging, editing and managing documents throughout the document life-cycle. Despite their static nature, paper documents still represent one of the preferred way of handling information in different situations, such as on the move or in collaboration. In order to overcome the limitations of paper and exploit the advantages of digital interfaces, new technologies for interactive paper have been introduced in recent years. Technologies such as the Anoto Digital Pen and Paper enable users to access digital information through interactions with printed copies. Links to digital content and services are defined on paper and activated when users interact with the paper sheet by means of a digital pen. Various research projects have investigated how to best enable interactions with digital services through interactive paper interfaces. The developed prototypes showed the potential of the available technologies for bridging the paper-digital divide and how paper and digital documents can be effectively interwoven. However, most of the existing approaches concentrate on enriching paper-digital interactions only, very often forgetting to take into account the process of producing interactive paper documents and the effective management of information across the two interfaces. The current lack of support for generating rich interactive paper documents leads to a separation of paper-digital documents in two detached entities, that can hardly be mapped again as the paper and digital instances of the same document. To further enrich the information exchange across the paper-digital boundary and to support a better management of paper-digital documents, we introduce a set of general concepts and models for supporting a novel information-centric infrastructure for publishing interactive paper documents. Our approach supports the automatic and semi-automatic generation of paper-based links to digital information, by intercepting the publishing process of a digital document and applying document analysis techniques to the underlying document models. Furthermore,