@begin(header) author: ack@amt.media.mit.edu show_author: ShowNone author_organization: MIT node_expert: x-ag@guilder.mit.edu expiration_date: 11/06/93 last_modifier: ack@amt.media.mit.edu last_mod_date: 11/06/91 mod_num: 1 @end(header) @b Below are excerpts from a working paper on Answer Garden, "Answer Garden and the Organization of Expertise" (by Mark S. Ackerman), available from the MIT Center for Coordination Science: In the following description, two versions of Answer Garden are to be distinguished. There is a version that will be employed in the user study. This version will be sent out on the MIT X11 release 5 "Contrib" tape. Additionally, there will be a release version that will incorporate any changes found to be necessary from the field study, as well as some additional components. Internally, Answer Garden looks like a collection of separate services held together by a common core: (figure omitted) In Answer Garden, links are stored symbolically in the information nodes. The links are resolved at run-time through the Node Service, which in turn relies on the File Service for access to actual storage. All data is kept in Ascii for portability. A flat file implementation of the File Service is being provided; it is possible to implement a File Service using a fully relational database. Each site has a separate information database, both for convenience and for local tailorability. In terms of what the user sees, Answer Garden is a support mechanism for a wide variety of user interface presentations, information retrieval engines, and communication mechanisms. There are several built-in presentation objects, including Structured Browser nodes for questions and for structured text layout, Discussion nodes for collections of electronic mail, QA nodes to handle large numbers of questions and answers as well as bug reports and enhancement announcements, and Code nodes for software examples. Each has anywhere from a slightly to a radically different interface presentation. The design of Answer Garden is such that sites requiring additional presentation styles or separate objects can easily add their own (each in what is called a Sorta-Object). In addition, Answer Garden supports (or can support) a wide variety of information retrieval engines. The diagnostic questions, shown above, can be thought of a retrieval engine for computer-sophisticated, but domain-naive end-users. There is some evidence that properly structured questions may ease the burden on naive users of formulating proper queries (Sebrechts and Swartz 1991). Other engines include keyword retrieval and semi-structured retrievals. As well, Answer Garden supports the use of a variety of communication engines. Answer Garden currently supports two standard Unix electronic mail packages, but interfaces to MIT's Zephyr synchronous communication package, voice mail, and video links are planned. Only keyword retrieval and standard Unix mail packages are being supported for the user study version. (figure omitted) The portion of the software shown above is actually just the interface presented to the end-user. Usually, this "front-end" is called the Answer Garden. More properly, there are actually five components. The "front-end" interface is combined with an authoring subsystem. People authoring new information nodes do so in the context of the Answer Garden itself. There are (or will be) also some additional authoring tools, which in the Unix style are stand-alone programs, to test for dangling references and node completeness, to build the grapher trees, and to check for pruning requirements. In a production system, a publish-subscribe server and a question-answer tracking server would be required. Assuming a centralized service, user sites who wished new information would "subscribe" to Answer Garden answers. They would want to do so by Answer Garden subtree since there will be many subtrees that are not of interest to all sites. As experts authored new information, they ould send the answers (and any accompanying diagnostic questions) to this centralized service. The service would, then, in turn "publish" the answers to the subscribers. The question-answer tracking server would log in-coming questions, lock questions for individual experts, and make sure that each question is answered. It is to employ a hand-shaking protocol similar to that of TCP-IP but implemented through electronic mail. A prototype of the latter server is being implemented for the user study in Object Lens. A prototype of the publish-subscribe server will be built for the release version; there is no need for it in the user study. On the end-user site side, a simple program to show any incoming Answer Garden answers is required. Many sites will not permit incoming files to be placed in their file system without the ability to manually override. Of particular concern is that Answer Garden answers contain code examples; this raises the security hackles of site administrators.