The snippet system - Reusing and connecting documents

Abstract

This paper presents the Snippet System, a new operating system environment that aims at providing enhanced document management facilities. For this, the proposed system utilizes a novel document model based on finer-grained entities, so-called Snippets. These support Relations, which capture the context of individual document excerpts. Snippets furthermore enable a flexible reuse of documents, i.e., user-defined excerpts can be included in several other documents with only selected properties remaining synchronized between different instances. Moreover, dedicated mechanisms allow for the efficient retrieval of these instances and thus support the user in keeping track of reused excerpts and synced properties. While the Snippet System's concepts extend into the application and user interface layers, this paper focuses in particular on the design and prototypical implementation of its document model, describing how the reuse of document excerpts, the synchronization and retrieval of their different instances, and Relations are supported in a natural and scalable way.

Collaborative Writing Across Multiple Artifact Ecologies

“…In addition to obvious avenues for improving transitions in a current context, such as object embedding for simultaneous editing and forking/merging text, our results lend merit to alternative paradigms, such as document-centric models [37], instrumental interaction [2,39], or activity-centric perspectives [31,34], that more fully than the application-centric model acknowledge artifact ecologies as the stage for work and other activities, collaborative or individual. Some of our findings parallel issues found in group reading [55] and library group work [44], indicating the relevance of the current study beyond collaborative writing specifically.…”

“…We see significant challenges in supporting collaborative writing across artifact ecologies rather than contained within individual tools, with transitions largely happening through copy-pasting. This points to the exploration of document-and activity-centric [37,34] alternatives for application design as an avenue for future work.…”

The Snippet Platform Architecture – Dynamic and Interactive Compound Documents

“…The architecture also includes a fine-grained document model that persistently represents compound documentsconsisting of various content types potentially authored by different components -through graphs of interrelated Snippets [10] that constitute specific content elements. Thus, the contents maintained by different components can be combined in the same document, while remaining separate Snippets.…”