PERSONAL AND SOCIAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
WITH OPNTAG
Lee Iverson, Maryam Najafian Razavi and Vanesa Mirzaee
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Keywords: Personal Information Management (PIM), Social Information Management, Tagging, Privacy.
Abstract: We examine the principles of personal information management in a social context and introduce OpnTag,
an open source web application for note taking and book marking developed to experiment with these
principles. We present the design motivation and technical structure of OpnTag, along with a discussion of
how it supports our design philosophy. We also describe a few examples of how it is actually used, how this
usage has improved our understanding of Social-Personal information management (SPIM) principles, and
our plans for future enhancements.
1 INTRODUCTION
Information plays a central role in our everyday life.
In addition to creating information we often acquire,
process, and evaluate existing information to create
new sources of information and knowledge. For
many, this accumulated information is a central
component of their daily life. This collection is often
referred to as an individual’s Personal Information.
The act of acquiring, organizing, maintaining, and
retrieving one’s personal information is known as
Personal Information Management or PIM
(Bergman et al, 2004). Nowadays, it is likely that
much of one’s personal information is stored in
digital forms such as electronic documents, email
messages, web references and other digital resources
usually found within a person’s computer system or
on the web. In order to manage these digital libraries
of personal information resources, people often
utilize software systems (i.e. email applications,
digital calendars, file systems, and web-bookmark
tools) which we will refer to as Personal Information
Management Systems (PIMS).
Conventionally, PIM is considered a private
activity. However, personal information is often
created with sharing in mind or as a result of
information sharing activities. This gives personal
information management a social dimension, an
aspect not properly explored by existing PIMS
(Erickson, 2006). However, when people transfer
their personal information from a private repository
(e.g. one’s desktop) into a social space (e.g. the
Web) they are typically forced to give up control of
some aspects of their information. First, people are
no longer free to organize this information in their
own terms and are often forced to categorize it into
pre-defined taxonomies provided by the particular
application being used (e.g. scholarly digital
libraries or web forums). Second, people are often
limited as to how to define what information (and
perhaps to whom) to reveal or conceal.
The recent emergence of Web 2.0 applications as
a new trend for managing personal information has
created new opportunities for users. These
applications not only allow their users to create
personal information spaces that are easily
accessible from anywhere on the Web, but also give
them the tools to organize these information spaces
in their own terms, share it with others, and take
advantage of others' shared knowledge. Although
some Web 2.0 applications are beginning to account
for the social aspects of information management
(e.g. del.icio.us
i
, ma.gnolia
ii
), the relationship
between the personal and social dimensions of
information management remain largely unexplored
in the research literature.
In this paper, we will examine the basic
principles of what we call social-personal
information management (SPIM) and then introduce
OpnTag
iii
, an open source web application for note
taking and book marking developed by our group to
experiment with these principles. In section 2 and 3
we present the design motivation and technical
structure of OpnTag, along with a discussion of how
195
Iverson L., Najafian Razavi M. and Mirzaee V. (2008).
PERSONAL AND SOCIAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT WITH OPNTAG.
In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - HCI, pages 195-203
DOI: 10.5220/0001689401950203
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

it supports our design philosophy. We then proceed
in section 4 to describe a few examples of how
Opntag is used, how its usage improved our
understanding of SPIM principles. Finally, section 5
outlines our conclusions and our plans for future
enhancements.
2 DESIGN MOTIVATION
The design of OpnTag has been guided by three
basic principles:
1. Allowing users to maintain personal ownership
and control over personal and shared information,
2. Providing the means for users to share
information at different degrees between the
extremes of "private" and "public", and
3. Utilizing tagging and intrinsic metadata as
primary organizing tools
The following sections provide a more in depth
description of each of these principles and the
motivations behind them.
2.1 Information Ownership
and Control
In today's world, when one engages with an online
forum or uses a webmail application or social
networking system, there are certain questions that
one is often unable to find answers to: who owns the
content? Who is exploiting that information to create
value? Who is responsible for its care? Is it portable
so that I can reuse it in other contexts? Can I remove
my information from someone else's control without
losing access to the information itself? We believe,
in order to build information systems that truly
support personal information needs, they must
provide a complete, persistent sense of the degree to
which information that an individual creates or
consumes is his/her own, the amount of control he
has over the use of that information, and the ability
to properly assess or exploit its value.
This carries over strongly to situations where the
information being stored and potentially exchanged
is creative, analytic and/or work-related, as now the
information itself, the way it is organized and its
patterns of use and production have value as
personal knowledge. Existing theories of knowledge
sharing have compared the exchange of information
between people with the exchange of money in
economic systems (Fuller, 2002): To have
knowledge is to be able to solve problems, predict
outcomes, and influence others. All of these have
great economic potential and in our "knowledge
economy" it is the content, organization and control
of one's knowledge that creates economic advantage
for both organizations and individuals. Even though
moving local information into online repositories
often implies sharing with groups beyond users'
control (e.g. see Amazon's Terms of Use), people are
often willing to do so for two reasons: 1) online
tools provide significant enhancements in utility and
cost (e.g. Google Mail is free, intuitive, reliable and
available anywhere) over similar desktop tools; and
2) it becomes remarkably easy to share information
and generate an audience when you choose to put
that information and knowledge online. These two
advantages are in many cases so strong that users are
either explicitly willing to give up control of that
information or do so without any real awareness of
the degree to which they are doing so.
An ideal solution to this problem would be a
system for managing personal information that had
the advantages of local storage systems in terms of
control over organization, access and exploitability,
but that was managed online where it could be easily
shared with others. Researchers have long imagined
and indeed built network-base "data banks" that
safely store and manage personal records (e.g. health
data banks), but have largely left unexplored the
issues of manipulation, organization and personal
control over those records. One of the main
motivations behind the design of OpnTag then has
been to create such a data bank, but with
unambiguous personal ownership and control of the
information stored in it.
2.2 Different Shades between
"Private" and "Public"
When we examine the new generation of Web 2.0
systems as SPIM tools the gap between their
personal and the social aspects becomes obvious.
Clearly, when using such tools users are aware of
both the personal utility and social projection of
their information (Marlow et. al. 2006). However,
other research suggests that when personal
information is shared with a group, the way it is used
and managed changes (Erickson, 2006), and both the
nature of the information and of the group are
critical to these changes. This highlights the need for
users to be able to define and manipulate the sharing
contexts. In particular, personal artifacts managed by
SPIM tools may span a wide range of types, from
ones’ contact information and interests to his/her
social network, scholarly work, and opinions. These
kinds of information may be public, private or
selectively shared with well-defined and understood
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groups, and the sharing may happen in a variety of
contexts, for example competitive as well as
collaborative. Furthermore, the nature and state of
these personal artifacts, the group with which they
are shared, and the relationships between the owner
and the receivers of information are all dynamic (i.e.
drafts become publications, people join or leave a
group, and users change team/projects) (Razavi and
Iverson, 2006). We claim that this combination of
context-sensitivity and dynamicity makes both the
public/private dichotomy (as seen in many Web 2.0
systems such as del.icio.us) and static access control
models (derived from file system and enterprise
service security models) inadequate for SPIM
applications (Razavi and Iverson, 2007).
In the SPIM domain the information sharing act
is often about establishing and maintaining a
dynamic sharing relationship: users have nuanced
ideas about what they want to share with whom in
what context and rather than a binary scale of public
vs. private, their judgment of the privacy of their
resources often reflects a transition from private, to
semi-private/restricted share, to public, depending
on the state of the artifact, the group in which it is
shared, and the context of sharing.
An underlying user interaction model must then
take into account that at any time during an artifact’s
life cycle, artifacts’ categorizations might change;
users' need to share classes of artifacts with certain
audiences might change; and user’s relationships
and trust patterns within those relationships might
change. Finally, users come to expect their tools to
provide flexible support for these changes in their
privacy preferences when the social parameters that
define the sharing model change (Razavi and
Iverson, 2006).
From a user’s point of view, the primary concern
in managing information sharing is the ability to
define the audience that will have access to their
information. A simple example is the case of contact
management, in which users selectively choose
which of a variety of different categories of ‘friend’
and ‘colleague’ will be allowed to contact them in a
particular way (e.g. who do I give my phone
number, address, or AIM id to?). Without aid of
technology, we either publish them for all to see or
hand them out individually or in particular contexts
(e.g. I tend to give my cell phone number to students
I teach, but not other students). Generally, the choice
of audience for a particular artifact or personal
attribute is expressed in terms of a group of others
who one trusts with that particular piece of
information, so tools should provide support for the
definition and manipulation of these groups in which
information is to be shared.
Traditionally, group definition for access control
has been based on organizational roles (i.e. RBAC
(Sandhu et. al., 1996)) or the equivalent (i.e. task
(Thomas and Sandhu, 1997)). While it makes sense
for an organization to align access rights to
organizational roles, it makes little sense for a user
to align privacy rights with those organizational
roles especially when their members are managed by
others. In the social networking world, access is
often defined in terms of 'networks of friends'
relationships, in which all `friends' are created equal
and are often required to be reciprocal (e.g. in
Facebook
iv
). But when dealing with information
privacy in the SPIM domain, the potential audience
for personal artifacts or attributes must be defined in
a user’s own terms, based on a variety of kinds of
relationships, some of which are one-sided. As such,
our second design motivation has been to enable
users to define egocentric groups of friends or
collaborators and then enable them to assign access
rights to their personal information based on these
user-controlled relationship models. We will
describe how Opntag handles this need below.
2.3 Tagging as Primary Organizing
Tool
Finally, we approach the issue of information
organization. Long one of the most difficult and
problematic issues for PIM systems, it has been long
obvious that neither traditional filesystem models
(i.e. files and folders) nor newer semantic
approaches were adequate for managing a wide
range of kinds of information (as seen in PIM
systems) in a cohesive, intuitive and user-centered
fashion. Recently, however, Web 2.0 applications
(in particular del.icio.us and Flickr
v
) have presented
"tagging" as an incremental, user-centered strategy
for organizing personal information in a public
space.
The web bookmarking service del.icio.us first
introduced tagging to a broad audience by asking its
members to submit a list of words along with any
bookmark to be saved. Any word or set of words can
be associated with a bookmark and they form the
fundamental organizational structure of the system.
In essence, each tag that I use becomes a "category"
within my own information space and since I can
use as many tags as I want for each item, I place any
item in as many categories as makes sense to me.
PERSONAL AND SOCIAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT WITH OPNTAG
197

Figure 1: Opntag.
Moreover, tagging plays out socially by allowing
me to see other's bookmarks and tags, to see what
resources have been tagged the most, and who else
has tagged the same items I have or has used the
same tags. In other words, it simultaneously solves a
wide array of different issues with personal and
social information organization such as multiple
categorization, recommendation and even the
discovery of like-minded others, all without
imposing any top-down "correct" organizational
model on any user.
Unfortunately, tagging alone seems insufficient.
For one, there is a great deal of other metadata
associated with PIM resources that is potentially
exploitable (e.g. when items were tagged, viewed,
modified, copied or used and by whom). It is for that
reason that we suggest that the tagging model be
augmented by detailed tracking of these events (the
"behavioural" metadata for the system) and an
integrated ability to exploit them. In essence, we
suggest tagging as the key deliberate organizational
model and the exposure of passively created intrinsic
and behavioural metadata to augment this.
Therefore, we designed Opntag tagging
classification model with these principals in mind.
3 OPNTAG CONCEPTUAL
MODEL
The main purpose of OpnTag is to facilitate creation,
organization and consumption of information and
knowledge for an individual operating in a social
environment. The fundamental unit of information
storage in OpnTag is the ‘memo’, a tagged textual
annotation that may optionally link to a web
resource. Users create memos to save notes or
bookmark URLs, browse and tag other users’ shared
memos to mark their interest in them, and reply to
other users’ memos to create a conversation.
Another important component of Opntag are
Groups. Opntag users can use groups to define
various communities to collaboratively create and
manage information and knowledge. The following
sections present a brief description of Opntag's key
concepts.
3.1 Memo
A Memo is the basic unit of memory in Opntag. It
has a Name or Title, an optional Link (URL)
specifying what it is "about", a set of Tags, and some
text (its content). It is owned by an individual or
group and has a potentially restricted audience
(described below). Memos can function as
bookmarks, notes, or web pages and are organized
based on their intrinsic metadata (e.g. who owns or
created them and when) and tags applied by various
users.
Memos have globally unique system-assigned
IDs and may have a user-assigned Name which is
unique among all memos owned by the same user or
group. This unique name can be used to refer to that
Memo in a more meaningful way than the ID, either
when linking from another Memo (using a "named
reference" shorthand), or when providing a URL.
For example, when one wants to refer to a named
Memo within Opntag, one only needs to provide a
reference to the Memo's owner and Memo's Name
(e.g. a link to Folksonomy in Leei's Space is written
as [[Leei:Folksonomy]]). This will create a
hyperlink to that named Memo. This gives Memos a
Wiki-like functionality (the ability to refer to pages
by name). Like Wiki pages a Memo does not have to
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Figure 2: Memo.
exist to be referred to, following a Memo's name
link actually opens a dialogue to create the Memo if
it does not exist. With this in place, OpnTag enables
its users to easily create both individual notes and
bookmarks and networks of cross-referenced
information units.
3.2 Tags & Spaces
Opntag provides its users with personal and social
information management workspaces (referred to as
"spaces"). A space is a workspace within which a
single User or the members of a Group (see below)
can work to create, edit, and organize a body of
information consisting of memos and associated
tags. Opntag utilizes tags as a lightweight and
flexible way to organize, contextualize, and
represent Memos.
A User's personal Space contains all Memos
created, edited, or tagged by the User and a set of
tags associated with these Memos by the User (refer
to as User's TagCloud). A Group's Space includes
any Memos specifically in that Space or specifically
visible to that Group and their associated tags along
with the Group's TagCloud (a Group's TagCloud is a
collection of tags associated with Memos owned by
the Group).
Within a User's Personal Space only that User
may create, edit or tag Memos whereas within a
Group's Space, any member of the Group may do so.
By placing a Memo in a group Space, all members
of that Space can edit it.
3.3 Navigation & Grouping
As in other tag-based systems, objects in Opntag are
grouped based on ownership and tagging. Users
initially have access to all memos (as restricted by
the memos' visibility) and from there can select
subsets by filtering based on an ownership "space", a
tag or set of tags, or some combination of those (e.g.
all Leei's memos tagged "rails" and "javascript").
Thus these attributes of a memo, both the intrinsic
metadata and user-supplied tags, both identify and
group memos. The navigation model depends on
selecting these filters via hyperlinks (thus each set of
filters is represented by a distinct URL) and adding
and removing filters based on links created and
presented in each display context. The tagcloud
described above is one such context.
3.4 User
A User is an individual who has an account with
Opntag. Being a personal information management
application, Opntag provides each User with a
personal Space where s/he has complete control as
how to organize, represent, and share information.
Users are the only ones who can create, edit, tag and
delete Memos within their own personal Space.
3.5 Group
A fundamental goal of OpnTag is to provide
selective sharing, which is supported through
creation and management of groups. The primary
function of groups is to allow a set of people with a
shared interest to create a context for selectively
sharing personal information and a collective space
within which they can actively collaborate to create,
edit and organize information either publicly or in
private. Because groups have their own views of
entries assigned to them and their own tag lists, a
group can be a very convenient way for sets of
people to get a more focused view of their data than
by searching or browsing through the main page. If
one group is made a member of another (a subgroup
relation) then all of its members are necessarily
members of the enclosing group (a nested set
relation). A number of special groups exist: "Users"
which includes all individuals registered with the
OpnTag instance, "Unknown" which includes the
anonymous, unregistered user, and "Anyone" which
includes both groups and thus represents truly public
access.
With individuals and groups, OpnTag's access
and privacy control centre around the joint concepts
of ownership and audience. For each memo, the
creator can specify the memo’s owner, which
controls who owns the memo and thus can edit and
delete it, and its audience, which controls who can
see that the memo exists and read it. In OpnTag,
visibility implies readability, so there is no “I can
see that it exists but can’t read it” issue. The
audience for a memo can be either set to the owner
(either an individual user or a group) of the memo,
or to any super-group of that, including "Users" and
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"Anyone", which are super-groups of all others.
Only the creator can modify ownership, but any
member of the owning group can change a memo's
audience. This audience restriction is thus the
fundamental privacy control in OpnTag, and it is
determined either individually or collectively. It can
be set or modified for a variety of different objects
and attributes besides memos in OpnTag (such as
profile entries and tags), but for simplicity of
description we will mention only memo audience in
the discussion below.
OpnTag supports two types of groups: Classic
groups and Egocentric groups.
3.5.1 Classic Groups
Classically, a group is defined as a set of people with
a common interest and membership in a group is
voluntary. This mirrors the "group" model provided
by systems such as Google or Yahoo groups and is
directly supported by OpnTag. Users can choose to
be members of as many such groups as they want,
and can create as many groups as they want.
Membership. At the moment, group membership is
by invitation: each member of the group may invite
as many people to the group as s/he wants by
sending an invitation to their email address.
Visibility. For each group created, the creator
specifies the group's visibility (one of "Members
Only", "Users", or "Anyone"), and the visibility of
the member list (same options as group visibility
plus "Private", meaning no one would know of
user’s membership in the group except for the user
himself). Of course, the visibility of the memos, tags
and member list of a group is restricted by the
visibility of the group itself (e.g. it is not possible to
make a group visible only to its members, but make
its member list visible to anyone). By using various
combinations of group and members list visibility,
users can create groups with different dynamics and
then restrict the visibility of their memos or profile
items to any of these groups, including the ‘private’
group consisting only of oneself. With these
variations available, we hope to be able to
investigate how trust and sharing behaviours can
vary depending on the visibility and dynamics of the
sharing context.
Administration. Currently, all group members have
equal administrative rights, which include creating
subgroups, inviting new members, tagging within
the group, and editing, deleting and changing the
visibility of any group-owned memo. Groups can be
destroyed only if they have no memos and only by
the group's creator.
3.5.2 Egocentric Groups
In addition to these "classic" groups, OpnTag also
supports a different type of group called egocentric
groups. Egocentric groups primarily provide support
for relationship management and are handled by
tagging people through their profile pages. When
visiting another user's profile page, a user can tag the
profile with keywords that represent his/her
perception of that user or their relationship (i.e. a
teacher might tag their students as “student” or “grad
student”). In the same way that tagging resources
both identifies and groups them (e.g. all memos
tagged "rails" can be treated as a group), each such
"people tag" represents a relationship group that is
usable as a privacy control feature. When creating
self-owned memo, the user has access to both his
group memberships and his relationship tags and can
thus set the audience of the memo to either a group
he is a member of or one of these egocentric groups.
Thus he can adjust his audience to either one of the
groups with collective membership dynamics or one
over which he/she has complete control. Again, we
plan to investigate the implications of this for trust
and sharing behaviour.
Membership. People tags are assigned and removed
only by the tagger. As such, the relationship groups
that are created as a result of people tagging are
entirely controlled by the creator; meaning people do
not need to agree to be in the group, and they may
not even know that they are included in a certain
relationship group. An important implication of
users being able to assign their acquaintances to
different relationship groups (potentially without
their knowledge or approval) is the opportunity for
handling many social situations that can be hard to
handle in social networking systems (e.g. discretely
concealing exclusions when necessary).
Visibility. Each new tag applied to a person has a
distinctly specifiable visibility. The choices for
people tag visibility include only the tagger, only the
taggee, only the set of people tagged with the same
tag (by the same tagger), "Users", and "Anyone".
Significantly, a single tag may have different
visibility to different taggees (e.g. a man might tag
multiple women with "girlfriend" so that each only
sees their own tag), but in no case can the tagger
make a tag visible to anyone other than the taggee
without also making it visible to the taggee himself.
Since all such tags are visibly attributed to the tag
creator, this design choice was made to discourage
antisocial tagging by forcing such taggings to be
exposed to their subjects (e.g. I can't let my friends
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Figure 3: Creating Egocentric groups.
know that I've tagged someone as a "jerk" without
letting the "jerk" know too).
Administration. Unlike classic groups, egocentric
groups are controlled entirely by the creator: the acts
of creating or deleting a tag on a user, and
controlling the visibility of the tag are solely
controlled by the tagger and easily modified. We
believe that this makes the act of people tagging
lightweight and suitable for handling the dynamics
of relationships that frequently show up and fade out
in natural social environments, but can be difficult to
manage online.
3.6 Messages
To support consumption and management of
information (and knowledge) Opntag automatically
notifies its Users of the activity in their Spaces
(either personal space or group space) through
"Messages". The "Messages" page contains a list of
of such notifications for the User from the System.
These messages are created whenever others create,
update, tag, delete, or reply to a Memo within a
Space of which the user is a member (e.g. so-and-so
created or modified a Memo in one of your Spaces,
or so-and-so replied to one of your Memos). The
User can see the Memos referred to and manage
these notices as one might manage email (ignore
etc.).
4 USAGE
Since its release as part of GUSSE
vi
demonstration
in June 2005, OpnTag has been adopted by over 100
users. In addition to individual usage, various groups
have been using OpnTag for educational or
organizational purposes. Here we present two
experiences of deploying OpnTag in real world
situations. We discuss the scenarios, the feedback,
and the changes we made to the design as a
response.
4.1 CrowdTrust
CrowdTrust
vii
is a small start-up focused on creating
collective intelligence solutions and active in the
development of OpnTag. The company has 8
members, including designers, developers,
marketers, and CEO. The CrowdTrust team has been
using OpnTag for information management and
sharing within the organization for over a year.
Separate groups have been created to serve different
information sharing purposes: the "CrowdTrust"
group is the main group that all the corporate staff
are a member of. Issues relevant to all team
members such as meeting plans and agenda, meeting
minutes, competing companies, similar products,
and potential customers are shared between staff by
creating memos either in the CrowdTrust space, i.e.
in situations where any CrowdTrust member is
expected to contribute; or in member's personal
PERSONAL AND SOCIAL INFORMATION MANAGEMENT WITH OPNTAG
201

space visible to CrowdTrust, so that other
CrowdTrust members can also see it. There are also
two other groups, each with a selected subset of
corporate staff as members: "CrowdTrust Help",
used by developers for communicating help
materials on company's product to the customers;
and "CrowdTrust Board", used by company board
members for discussing management issues.
The CrowdTrust experience has helped us clarify
which features of the application users appreciate the
most and which parts of the interface are confusing
to them. We have not done a formal usability study
in this context, since many of the users are also
system developers, but it has been clear that for at
least some of us, engaging with the tool has become
an essential daily activity and valuable resource. It is
also clear that engaging with both the privacy
control and tag-based organization is simple, natural
and no great barrier to usability.
4.2 ETEC522
In the fall of 2007, OpnTag was used as the main
course information and interaction system for ETEC
522, an online course on educational technologies
offered by the University of British Columbia.
Students used it for both their own information
management within the course and for conversation
and sharing resources with the rest of the class.
Throughout this process, we had no negative
feedback with respect to the privacy or information
management aspects of the system.
The major criticisms from use in this context
were centred on the management of conversation
and awareness using the tool. At the start of the
course, when students asked for the memos for the
group "ETEC 522", the system would select those
memos "owned" by the group. It was clear that this
was inadequate, in the sense that the students
expected that specifying the audience of a memo for
"ETEC 522" would also have the effect of it being
seen in the group "space". After this, we revisited
the selection of memos considered to be part of a
"space" (for an individual or group) and realized that
there are various ways of both claiming a memo for
oneself and providing it to a group. Currently, when
visiting an individual's space the memo set includes
all memos created, modified or tagged by that user.
When visiting a group's space the memo set includes
memos owned by the group, tagged in the group and
memos made explicitly visible to the group.
Moreover, OpnTag's message system notifies all
members of a group when any of these memos are
created or modified. In this way, membership in the
group now allows one to both contribute to and
monitor the group in a variety of ways.
5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
In this paper, we presented Opntag, an online, open
source web 2.0 personal and social information
management application. The primary design
motivation behind Opntag is to support fluid
organization and sharing of personal and social
information. We attempt to accomplish this by:
• allowing individuals to maintain control and
ownership of their information in both their
personal and social spaces.
• supporting the creation of various communities
where members can collaborate and selectively
create, manage and share information
• adopting a tag-based organizational model and
augmenting it with intrinsic metadata to support
better exploitation and navigation of the space
Like many other web based applications, OpnTag is
constantly being updated and improved upon.
Functional updates can be very frequent –
sometimes even occurring daily. In addition to these
minor modifications, we are currently pursuing a
number of larger extensions:
1. Managing the space between audience control,
which bounds the audience for any particular
item or conversation, and audience notification,
which makes the audience specifically aware of
certain activities. We are currently extending
the notification model to allow more specific
control by both information producers and
consumers of the streams of notification
information managed by OpnTag. This work is
motivated by feedback received during the
ETEC5221 user study.
2. Creating a semantically rich tagging
classification model by providing Opntag's
users with the means to construct relationships
between tags in a way that is meaningful to
them. For example, I might state that my tag
‘CSCW’ will automatically be added to any
memos tagged with both ‘email’ and ‘research’.
This will allow us to make the transition from
tag relationships (e.g. “related to”) that are
trivial, un-interpreted, and mechanistic, to tag
structures that are rich, user-interpreted, and
personally created. We believe that creating
more complex relationships between tags will
allow Opntag’s users to not only create
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collections of information resources that are
more refined and have deeper context but will
also enable them to create information spaces
that are easier to navigate and explore.
REFERENCES
Bergman, O., Boardman, R., Gwizdka, J., and Jones. W.,
2004. Personal information management SIG. In
Extended Abstracts of CHI 2004. ACM Press. pp.
1598-1599
Marlow, C., Naaman, M., Boyd, D., Davis, M., 2006.
Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article,
ToRead. In Proceedings of Hypertext 2006, New
York: ACM Press.
Erickson, T., 2006. From PIM to GIM: personal
information management in group contexts. In
Communications of the ACM, January 2006
Fuller, S., 2002. Knowledge management foundations,
Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann
Razavi, M. N., Iverson, L., 2006. Design guidelines for an
information privacy management system for personal
learning spaces. In Proceedings of e-learn 2006,
Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
Razavi, M. N., Iverson, L., 2007. Designing for privacy in
personal learning spaces. In New Review of
Hypermedia and Multimedia, In press.
Sandhu, Ravi S., Coyne, Edward J., Feinstein, Hal L., &
Youman, Charles E., 1996. Role-based access control
models. In Computer. Volume 29, Number 2, pp 38-47.
Thomas, R., Sandhu, R., 1997. Task-based authorization
controls (TBAC): Models for active and enterprise-
oriented authorization management. In Database
Security XI: Status and Prospects, North-Holland.
i
http://del.icio.us
ii
http://ma.gnolia.com/
iii
http://sourceforge.net/projects/opntag
iv
www.facebook.com/
v
http://www.flickr.com
vi
http://gusse.org/
vii
http://crowdtrust.com/
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