Object lens: a “spreadsheet” for cooperative work

Abstract

Management in the 1990s is an industry and governmental agency supported research program. Its aim is to develop a better understanding of the managerial issues of the 1990s and how to deal most effectively with them, particularly as these issues revolve around anticipated advances in Information Technology.Assisting the work of the Sloan School scholars with financial support and as working partners in research are: The conclusions or opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, the Management in the 1990s Research Program, or its sponsoring organizations. AcknowledgementsThe work described in this paper was supported, in part, by Wang Laboratories, Xerox Corporation, General Motors/Electronic Data Systems, Bankers Trust Company, the Development Bank of Singapore, and the Management in the 1990s Research Program at the Sloan School of Management, MIT.We would especially like to thank Ken Grant who suggested some of the earliest ideas that led to Object Lens and Jin Lee who helped debug the most recent version. The Object Lens system and this paper have also benefitted from conversations with Cheryl Clark, Kevin Crowston, Randy Davis, Frank Halasz, Mitch Kapor, Stan Lanning, Wendy Mackay, Ramana Rao, Randy Trigg, David Rosenblitt, and Franklyn Turbak. AbstractObject Lens allows unsophisticated computer users to create their own cooperative work applications using a set of simple, but powerful, building blocks. By defining and modifying templates for various semistructured objects, users can represent information about people, tasks, products, messages, and many other kinds of information in a form that can be processed intelligently by both people and their computers. By collecting these objects in customizablefolders, users can create their own displays that summarize selected information from the objects in table or tree formats. Finally, by creating semiautonomous agents, users can specify rules for automatically processing this information in different ways at different times.The combination of these primitives provides a single consistent interface that integrates facilities for object-oriented databases, hypertext, electronic messaging, and rule-based intelligent agents. To illustrate the power of this combined approach, we describe several simple examples of applications (such as task tracking, intelligent message routing, and database retrieval) that we have developed in this framework.

Envisioning communication

“…k terms of interface and architecture, the work reported hm is closely relatd to Ovd [16], Object Lens [11] (and its precursor, Mormation Lens), systems which display vrdues of sele~ed fields from objects (e.g., messages) in a table or tree and support end-user programming of agents (e.g., , email agents). Like Oval and Obje~Lens, our approach makes use of an object-oriented database that suppofi hypertext links.…”

HyperVoice

“…Finally, the List Format does not include a List Action, since the moderator will not be adding announcements directly to the master list. Implementation Programmers specify the primitives described above by filling in screen-based forms in the OVAL system [8], which runs on a Macintosh. These primitives are then written to a database file and transferred to an IBMcompatible PC.…”

“…For example, a user could enter a semi-structured object using a telephone form, but could send in a fax to be the contents of one of the fields, and an email message to be the contents of another. An extension of this idea would be to make the telephone an attemative mode of access to Lotus Notes or Oval [8] databases, for both entry and retrieval. CONCLUSION The main message of this paper is that it is possible and worthwhile to use the telephone as a platform for input and retrieval of semi-structured information objects.…”

Object lens

“…Much more detailed descriptions of Object Lens canbe found in [2]. Each Issue may have several Positions that "Respond to" it, and each Position, in turn, may have various Arguments that "Support" or "Object to" it.…”