Basic Ideas on lomScope

What's lomScope?

lomScope is a proxy server which adds supplemental information using LivingOM.
My image is like HUD on warbirds; a pilot can see terrain and enemies through transparent glass,
but the system projects additional info such as air-speed, altitude, heading, and position of enemies.
lomScope can automatically add links to concept page of LivingOM,
find anchors to URLs which are also stored in LOM's link page,
indicate existence of comments to the document stored in LOM,
and so on.

Functionalities

• links to concept description
  
• backlinks to artifacts in LOM which have anchors to the document
  
• links to artifacts in LOM which have quotes from the document(related to Taro's ORE works)
  
• filtering/emphasizing search engine results (do the backlink and quote-quoted referencing and decorate the result items)
  

enTWIne's point of view

• community of interests
  
  In a CoI, people from different disciplines come together.
  Each group of people can provide different glossaries.
  People can use such glossaries when watching web articles/papers
  of different disciplines.
  
  For example, if Ernie and Ning Deng could provide a glossary for city planning terms,
  I would use the glossaries when browsing related websites.
  
• Being used is a kind of rewards to creators.
  lomScope can provide more chance of getting browsed by embedded backlinks.
  
  

Related fields

• Hypermedia
  
  
  
  • Ken's Chimera(Open Hypermedia)
  
  
  • Webvise (HTTP proxy for hypermedia)
  
  


• HCI(Critiquing, Community Support)


• Network protocols (RFC2616 HTTP/1.1)


• Information Management (LivingOM)
  

Architecture

lomScope consists of three parts;

• proxy server
  
• document analyer
  
• document mixer
  

A user specify lomScope in browser's proxy setting.
The proxy server catches all requests from web browser.
The proxy dispatches HTTP request to the specified webserver on behalf of the local browser.
If the returned content is not a html document(e.g. gif image), the proxy just returns the contents as it is.
If the proxy gets a html document, the proxy passes the document to the analyzer module.

The analyzer modules issues queries to LivingOM, for example, "autoLinkConcepts".
The analyzer passes the result to mixer module with the original content.

The mixer module will "mix" tags into the original document.
Those tags can be anchors to concept description.
Some others can be anchors to comments on the original document.
Changing font size is also possible modification.

Finally, the proxy will return the "modulated" or "supplemented" document to the browser.

GUI

My current idea is to provide a small frame for command buttons("Concepts", "Bookmarks", "Comment on this" and so on).
Without pressing those buttons, the proxy won't modify the document.
It just returns the original document as it is.
When a user pressed one of the button, the proxy will engage "analyzer" and "mixer" modules to process the original document.
Also, another small frame will be provided at bottom or left, where some aux info(concept description, list of links to comments on the original document) can be displayed.

Issues to be concerned

• security (user authorization to prevent abuses)
  
• performance (traffic will be concentrated)
  
• to show the right info at the right time.
  
  For example, buttons at the small frame could be turned on/off
  according whether or not supplemental info is available or not.
  This can take some benefits of "embedded critiquing."
  
  However, it will delay the response time. I'll have to find out the point of ballance.
  
• how to provide/specify configurations of mixers/analyzers.
  
• how to motivate people to contribute their artifacts.
  
  In some fandom communities, jargon glossaries would work well and a contributor of word definitions can take benefit by adding a link to his website because getting attention of more
  people is a kind of status in such communities.
  
  In general CoIs, what will be give-and-take in this setting?