Minutes for Tuesday, 2 June 1998

• Recorder: Sarah
• Begin:12:00
• End: 1:00

Administration

Sign up for the picnic tomorrow. You need to bring something.

We may only need meetings a few times per week. Our next meeting will be Thursday at 1:00.

Reports

Hilary and Sarah have been doing research on annotaions. (See the agenda for URLs.) NCSA Mosaic only allows personal annotations. CoNote (the most promissing for what we are doing) is like a discussion thread. Hilary looked at the CGI source. Maybe we could adapt the bulletin board scripts for our purposes.

Kevin is working on the main CGI script. It calls other parts and takes any URL, describes it and spits it back out. It also gets cookies and stores them. He is looking into server-client collaboration.

Raphen had a question about the absolute time and corruption of log files. Then we had a discussion about longs and how the system stores data. We thought it was best to keep a separate file per session. We will need to collect some preliminary data so that we can estimate the sizes for various strategies. (For example, if we store by session, then we don't need to store user and session id for each event. However, we do increase the number of files and overhead.)

Further discussion of annotations

Possible displays:

• Annotation appears on the same window, on the side (marginal notes).
• A pop-up window shows the annotation. This could be a permanent window or one that shows up when the user clicks on the annotate button.
• The titles of all annotations would be on the window, but in order to view or edit the annotation, the browser goes to a new URL.
• The complete annotation is on the document (but possibly indented or in a different font).

We thought our annotation system would allow public, private and multiple group annotations. A guest account would be available as well.

Hilary and Sarah will design sample layouts and take surveys to see which one(s) people prefer. The survey will begin with our own group, but should progress to faculty and students (the summer directory may be a good place to start finding people to interview).