Toward Work-Centered Digital Information Services

Work-centered digital information services are a set of library-like services meant to address work group needs. Workplace users especially need to access legacy documents and external collections. They also frequently want to retrieve information (rather than documents per se), and they require that digital information systems be integrated into established work practices. Realizing work-centered digital information systems requires a broad technical agenda. Three types of analysis-document image, natural language, and computer vision, are necessary to facilitate information extraction. Users also need new user interface paradigms and authoring tools to better access multimedia information, as well as improved protocols for client-program interaction with repositories (collections). Moreover, entirely new types of documents must be developed to exploit these capabilities. The system developed by the authors follows a client-server architecture, in which the servers are repositories implemented as databases supporting user-defined functions and user-defined access methods. The repositories also serve as indexing servers. The authors are creating a prototype set of information services called the California Environmental Digital Information System, which includes a diverse collection of environmental data.