BOOM

An Experiment in Personal Information Spaces in the Museum Context

Students participants:

Michael Frei
Sunny Gleason
Shrinivas Samant

Introduction

Current digital library technology assumes that the user has a networked personal computer that is used to access server computers, which store content and provide information services. In practice, people increasingly use a variety of computing devices in their daily lives not all of which are continuously connected to a network. This growth of palm devices, hand-held computers, disconnected laptops, and embedded processors (e.g. "smart" mobile telephones) offer exciting opportunities for the creation of personalized information spaces - digital libraries with collections and services that correspond to targeted needs and situations.

Our work this year has focused on prototyping a system to enable individuals to exploit the mobility of these devices (specifically PalmOS devices) while using them for storage, access, and update of selected information resources, even when network access is impractical or impossible. This will stimulate the market for nomadic devices in contexts that are rich in their information needs.

Developing and deploying these nomadic digital libraries will require technology that is sensitive to two critical dimensions of these devices:

Device capability - Each computing device has unique hardware characteristics, including display capability, input mechanisms, presentation software, and hardware capacity.
Device connectivity - The connections of these devices to the networks vary in both permanence and speed.

These two dimensions can be characterized as device awareness. Our objective for the rest of this year is to investigate the viability of achieving device awareness with SyncML, a new protocol that is still under development.

A Scenario

The following scenario illustrates the ideas we have been working towards in the last year. This scenario shows how even achieving some of these goals could dramatically change the utility of mobile computing devices in everyday contexts.

A man goes to a museum with his mobile computing device. Upon entering the museum, he registers his profile at the information desk and walks into a gallery. Information for all the exhibits in this gallery are sent to his device as he enters. Since the system is aware of the device's capabilities, specifically storage and display potential, the content is automatically scaled to the capabilities of his machine. As he walks through the exhibit, he can use his device to retrieve more information on items of interest to him. He can also ask questions, leave comments, and possibly even view other user's past comments. Slowly, as he moves from exhibit to exhibit, he builds up a personal profile of content that he found interesting or useful. Later on that day, back at home, he browses through the content that he collected at the museum and possibly selects a few items to purchase from an online gift shop.

While this scenario does assume a few liberties, such as some kind of convenient connectivity, whether through radio or wireless ethernet, as opposed to current synchronization capabilities (through physical connection to a PC), we still feel that a high-level system that achieves these goals can be scaled easily to new communication architectures not yet available.

myBOOM

Our project for BOOM was the creation of a prototype system to achieve similar goals as the one mentioned above. We are working with limited technology with new, exciting capabilities just on the horizon, but we hoped to design a system that would simulate connectivity as closely as possible and allow users to conveniently build Personal Information Spaces targeted towards their own interests. Our project involved building a content server where user profiles can be created and modified. Users will register HandSpring Visors (running PalmOS) in their name and will be able to navigate through the projects on display at BOOM, requesting further information about projects of interest. By "syncing" at various synchronization points (laptop stations), the users can update their profile and retrieve additional information. The system unfortunately requires a great deal more user involvement than we would have hoped for, but we feel it illustrates the fundamental principles well.