My slides on KMEL 2011

1. Timeliner: Supporting
Collaborative Scientific Writing
Vladimir Tomberg
David Lamas
Mart Laanpere
KMEL 2011, Hong Kong – December 09, 2011

2. Intention to Write Scientific Paper
December 2011 Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere 2

3. 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
December 2011 Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere 3
Work, Erlbaum, 1990

4. Collaborative Writing Issues
• Finding right target (conference, journal);
• Finding right partners (bottom-up approach);
• Organizing “Personal Writing Environment”;
• Planning and managing collaborative writing
process
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5. How we plan collaborative writing?
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6. Research question: what are the
existing collaborative writing
patterns today among researchers?
December 2011 Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere 6

7. 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
December 2011 Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere 7

8. 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 Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere 8

9. Results Collected from
Activity-centered Design Study
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10. 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
December 2011 Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere 10

11. 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
December 2011 Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere 11

12. Designing Timeliner: a tool for
supporting collaborative scientific
writing
December 2011 Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere 12

13. Task and Activities of Collaborative Writing
(adapted from Curtis & Lowry, 2004)
December 2011 Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere 13

14. Inspiring ideas
• The “paper prototype” – real device
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15. Inspiring ideas
http://connectdesign.co.kr
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16. Inspiring ideas
http://miniplan.ru
…and software implementation
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17. Our idea
• Unwrapping the clock ring…
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18. Our idea
• Adding layers for targeted papers, resources
and community…
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19. Supporting Collaborative Writing
• … by recommending the peers and CfP
• … by linking the relevant resources
• … by monitoring the contributions from peers
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20. First Design Mock-up
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21. 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
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22. Timeliner Architecture
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23. 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
December 2011 Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere 23

24. Thanks for your time!
vtomberg@tlu.ee
drl@tlu.ee
martl@tlu.ee
December 2011 Vladimir Tomberg, David Lamas, Mart Laanpere 24