FlexNetDiscuss (FND) - Next Generation Discussion System for the Web

Learning materials are increasingly available on the WWW. But, learners are not facilitated to read actively or discuss and collaborate around the online contents Annotation and linking technologies can support active reading and increase opportunities for people to collaborate, and hence transform the Internet into a more effective learning medium. For example, they can be used to help students personalize their learning contents, and when these annotations and links are shared in the same medium in which the knowledge was created knowledge consumers are enabled to be an integral part of the knowledge transfer process.

Although annotation is the second most pervasive activity after reading, the current state of the Web is primarily a one-to-many medium and an asynchronous multi-user infrastructure as it is strongly biased towards passively reading and downloading previously authored documents. Changes and additions to the page are solely the purview of the original author. Another drawback is that links on the Web can only model 1-1 relationships and are embedded, uni-directional to whole documents or predefined anchors in the documents. These constraints severely limit our ability to situate conversations at specific places in arbitrary shared documents. In such applications, users interactively create linkages between the discourse and shared collaboration contexts under discussion in real time or on demand.

This research aims to provide an empowering easy-to-use environment for communication, collaboration, and content sharing on the Web. The proposed system brings annotation and advanced hypertext linking capabilities to facilitate discussions around explicit shared contexts in the discourse and arbitrary HTML documents on the Web. The system supports both synchronous and asynchronous discussions.

Prototype specification:

• Integrated synchronous and asynchronous communication and collaboration environment with hyperlinking capabilities to the shared contexts
• Fine grained Web annotation  
• Bidirectional n-ary linking constructs for relating within and between HTML document and forum instances, and their elements
• Multiple levels of group awareness and connectedness
• Runtime extensibility
• Portable architecture
• Seamless integration with a standard browser that supports DOM

A view of the user environment

Users can dynamically add links to their messages in real time and navigate easily from the discourse to the referenced document, and vice versa.