Fédération et amélioration des activités documentaires par la pratique d'annotation collective. (Federating and Improving Document-related Activities Through Collective Annotation Practice)

Daily activities carried out with paper documents are nowadays transposed onto their digital counterparts. A plethora of software enable people to achieve document-related activities. In particular, these comprise information retrieval used while drafting new documents. Documents may later be disseminated, exploited and organized in readers’ document repositories. Our study on current systems showed two main limitations. On the one hand, any system meets only one or at most two activities. The underlying activity compartmentalization is detrimental to users—who have to master and juggle several systems—as well as to systems—having partial knowledge of users’ needs. On the other hand, systems do not harness the organizational members’ documentrelated activities. The proposed contribution is twofold. Firstly, we designed a model for federating the documentrelated activities through collective annotation practice. Associated with this model are collective processes intending to give each activity the benefit of the other ones. This also fosters inter-user benefit as people take advantage of the group and vice versa. Actually, the purpose of the proposed approach is twofold: simplifying document access and appropriation while anticipating individuals’ needs to offer them unintrusive assistance. Secondly, our approach exploits the organizational members’ document repositories. Although they do contain highly valuable information being collected with a lot of efforts, they paradoxically remain dormant. With the aim of harnessing these information sources, we designed a multi-faceted interface for accessing any organization’s document resources. This interface allows the exploration of documents as well as users of these documents, according to various dimensions and granularity levels. Our proposals were validated through several experiments and the TafAnnote prototype development. They demonstrate the feasibility of our approach which federates document-related activities with collective annotation practice. Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse – UMR 5505 CNRS Université Toulouse 3 – Paul Sabatier, 118 route de Narbonne, F-31062 Toulouse cedex 9