This panel brings together experts from industry to represent varied perspectives on prevalent eCommerce XML standards that span both, business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer transactions. In particular, it examines the evolution of standards across these transactions over the past decade, the extent to which they have been adopted in the industry, the reasons for the adoption as well as the extent to which they have resulted in automating eCommerce transactions. The panelists also highlight pitfalls in current implementations and offer insights for what makes successful business process solutions in B2B and B2C eCommerce

The administration cost of today's complex IT systems is a major inhibitor of growth for many companies in the burgeoning services economy. One proposed solution is policy-based system administration - a type of autonomic computing system that can manage itself with minimum human intervention. To explore the cost-benefit tradeoffs of policy-based system administration, we conducted an experiment in which participants managed a simulated city (Policity) using either a policy-based interface or a manual GUI-based interface. Results showed that for novices, performance was 50% higher using the policy interface compared to using the manual interface, but the interaction workload was significantly higher with the policy interface than with the manual interface. Overall, our results suggest that policy-based system administration can provide substantial productivity improvement at the cost of some additional interaction workload.

A1 is a Java-based spreadsheet environment that enables system administrators to build small tools that simplify and automate common tasks, integrating real-time data across heterogeneous systems. A1 spreadsheets can be saved to a central repository, where they are published and shared as interactive web portlets. In this paper, we discuss the need for administrators to create their own tools, how the A1 environment is designed to support this need, and how A1's support for web publishing - without requiring special web programming - can enable teams to share, modify, and improve their tools. We also discuss the design and implementation of A1, and show a number of sample spreadsheets for various administration tasks.

Computer system administrators are the unsung heroes of the information age, working behind the scenes to configure, maintain, and troubleshoot the computer infrastructure that underlies much of modern life. However, little can be found in the literature about the practices and problems of these highly specialized computer users. We conducted a series of field studies in large corporate data centers, observing organizations, work practices, tools, and problem-solving strategies of system administrators. We found system administrators operate within large-scale, complex environments that present significant technical, social, cognitive, and business challenges. In this paper, we describe system administrator tool use in critical, high-cost, labor-intensive work through observational, survey, and interview data. We discuss our findings concerning administrator needs for coordinating work, maintaining situation awareness, planning and rehearsing complex procedures, building tools, and supporting complicated interleaved workflows.

The web is a social phenomenon, with businesses and individuals finding myriad reasons to both publish and access information. However, though millions of people are using it at any given moment, the web is a lonely place — much more like a catalogue than a bustling downtown. Users have individualised experiences that hide the presence of others. People think of the web as a kind of physical space in which they move to obtain information (Maglio and Barrett, 1997b; Maglio and Matlock, 1999), but they do not think of it as a kind of place that affords social interaction (Dieberger, 1999). Erickson (1993) defines “place” as “space plus meaning”, and Harrison and Dourish (1996) define it “as space which is invested with an understanding of behavioral appropriateness, [and] cultural expectations” (p. 69). Put simply, a sense of place derives from a shared understanding about a space, and interpersonal interactions are required to create shared understanding (see also Munro, Höök and Benyon, 1999). To transform the web from a simple space into a social place requires the structure of an interactive culture

The people who run large-scale computer systems deserve the attention of the HCI community. These professionals work with increasingly diverse and complex hardware and software, large systems often characterized as "unknowable" by a single person. Relying on relatively crude tools, these professionals keep the technological world running. By improving the system administration work environment, the cost of computing and risk of downtime will be decreased while the deployment of complex, beneficial systems will increase.This one-day workshop will focus on the HCI problems of system administrators, specifically management of scale and diversity, problem solving, and system monitoring and notification. Our goal is to bring together (1) HCI researchers, (2) middleware user interface software developers, and (3) real-world system administrators to form a cross-disciplinary community around this topic.

Attentive systems attend to what users do so that they can attend to what users need. Such systems track user behavior, model user interests, and anticipate user desires and actions. Because the general class of attentive systems is broad — ranging from human butlers to web sites that profile users — we have focused specifically on attentive information systems, which observe user actions with information resources, model user information states, and suggest information that might be helpful to users. In particular, we describe Simple User Interest Tracker (Suitor), an architecture for developing attentive information systems that track computer users through multiple channels — eye gaze, web browsing, application use, to determine interests and to try to satisfy information needs. By observing behavior and modeling users, Suitor can be used to find and display potentially relevant information that is both timely and non-disruptive to the user's ongoing activities.

article Free AccessIntermediaries personalize information streams Authors: Paul Maglio IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CAView Profile , Rob Barrett IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims Communications of the ACMVolume 43Issue 8Aug. 2000 pp 96–101https://doi.org/10.1145/345124.345158Published:01 August 2000Publication History 71citation2,505DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations71Total Downloads2,505Last 12 Months68Last 6 weeks6 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteView all FormatsPDF

Attentive systems pay attention to what users do so that they can attend to what users need. Such systems track user behavior, model user interests, and anticipate user desires and actions. Because the general class of attentive systems is broad — ranging from human butlers to web sites that profile users — we have focused specifically on attentive information systems , which observe user actions with information resources, model user information states, and suggest information that might be helpful to users. In particular, we describe an implemented system, Simple User Interest Tracker (Suitor), that tracks computer users through multiple channels — gaze, web browsing, application focus — to determine their interests and to satisfy their information needs. By observing behavior and modeling users, Suitor finds and displays potentially relevant information that is both timely and non-disruptive to the users' ongoing activities.

Information flows all around us all the time. Whether on computer networks, on telephone lines, or within the wiring of everyday devices such as coffeemakers or gas pumps, data are constantly being transmitted from one place to another. Much of the time, such data flow directly between information producers and information consumers. Sometimes, however, intermediary processes stand in the way of a simple data flow, for instance, to monitor traffic, to bridge between incompatible communication streams, or to customize or extend the functions that are natively available on a stream. Intermediaries can turn ordinary information streams into smart streams that enhance the quality of communication. Because information flows are now everywhere, there is a new opportunity for taking advantage of intermediary computation, but general principles and approaches have not yet been developed. This paper provides an introduction to the intermediary approach, describes an implemented Web intermediary framework and applications, and proposes extending intermediaries to other information streams.

Studies of informal mechanisms of knowledge sharing in corporate settings have greatly increased our understanding of collaboration in the workplace (e. g., Orr, 1986, 1990). For instance, Orr (1986) showed how informal interpersonal interactions in the form of narratives lead individuals to new understandings of work related problems. Ehrlich and Cash (1994) showed that information-finding can be a collaborative activity; specifically, that groups can have an "information mediator" who has such well-developed expertise that others come to that person for help. Nevertheless, most approaches to collaborative information-seeking rely either on explicit recommendations (e. g., Maes, 1994) or on synchronous collaboration (e. g., Moody, in press). By contrast, our approach is to facilitate the use of the distributed expertise within an organization by making available traces of experts'browsing and searching behavior. Relying on users'own knowledge of expertise within their organizations, our system helps users find only those documents that at least one expert in a particular field has already read. Our implementation, the Expertise Browser, stores the information-browsing paths and patterns of content experts, and then uses these to provide hints and help to others who are browsing or searching in similar areas. More precisely, a browse path is the trail of documents opened or any other informational resources used to locate, view, navigate, or create documents, including queries and results. Our system provides three ways to leverage expert browse paths: IIf the user knows a particular person with relevant expertise, the user can explicitly specify that the system should provide access to that person's browse paths that are relevant to the query. IIThe user can ask for the system to identify a ranked list of those with knowledge that appears relevant to current information needs and proceed as in (1). IIIThe user can ask the system to return browse paths of all experts relevant to a specific query,

Article Free Access Share on Informative things: how to attach information to the real world Authors: Rob Barrett IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, NWED-B2, San Jose, CA IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, NWED-B2, San Jose, CAView Profile , Paul P. Maglio IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, NWED-B2, San Jose, CA IBM Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, NWED-B2, San Jose, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims UIST '98: Proceedings of the 11th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technologyNovember 1998Pages 81–88https://doi.org/10.1145/288392.288576Published:01 November 1998Publication History 29citation728DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations29Total Downloads728Last 12 Months42Last 6 weeks6 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

In this paper, we sketch a model of what people do when they search for information on the web. From a theoretical perspective, our interest lies in the cognitive processes and internal representations that are both used in and affected by the search for information. From a practical perspective, our aim is to provide personal support for information-searching and to effectively transfer knowledge gained by one person to another. Toward these ends, we first collected behavioral data from people searching for information on the web; we next analyzed these data to learn what the searchers were doing and thinking; and we then constructed specific web agents to support searching behaviors we identified.