PHLAT

1
PHLAT

• Living In a Phat Phlatland-Ed Cutrell-

2
What is PhlatLand Anyway?

• Regime Change for Document Storage
• Topple the Tyranny of the Hierarchical File
  System!
  
• Content Metadata-driven user storage
• In PhlatLand, you dont really care where your
  stuff livesyou just want to be able to get back
  to it quickly and easily.
  
• Filter, search, browse by metadata
• Full text search

3
Whats Wrong With Windows (folders)?

• Folders and filenames are just tags with some
  oppressive properties
  
• C\My Documents\2002\Talks\CHI2002\Scrolling.ppt
• C\My Documents\Studies\Old Studies\Scrolling\MS4D
  ata Analyses\MS4Figures.doc
  
• Outlook\inbox\retired projects\scrolling\RE
  Model diffs
  
• D\Public\Studies\Scrolling\chi2002\ScrollingCHI02
  ec.doc
  
• Kill the folder metaphor
• Encourages one-object one-place cognitive
  model
  
• Instead of folders you have tags for a more
  purely semantic organization
  
• Tags CAN be organized hierarchically (but they
  dont HAVE to be!)

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TagsWhat Are They Good For?

• Why do people file documents, email, etc.?
• Help to find again later
• Organize tasks
• Keep workspace clean
• Organize stuff for other people (knowledge
  management)
  
• Other reasons (OWA, file sharing)
• Other ideas?

5
Why Keep Hierarchies?

• Good organizational structure for knowledge
• Lots of knowledge is already so structured
• Lots of people are highly trained in using them
  and tools for navigating them
  
• Maps onto real-world notions of space
• Objects live in specific places which can be
  mapped into other places, etc.
  

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So Whats Wrong With Hierarchies?

• Humans do not deal well with sharp category
  boundaries for knowledgesemantic webs
  
• Lots of garden-pathing, traversing up and down
  hierarchies to find things.
  
• Cyber space doesnt need to follow the same rules
  as spacean object doesnt really need to live
  anywhere.

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Four Main UI Challenges

• Organize
• Add metadata to stuff
• Automatic (user date, relevance, author, etc.)
• User-authored tags
• How do you create organize these? Apply them?
  How do you support expose hierarchy?
  
• Find
• Search/Browse/Identify your stuff
• Manage
• Must be able to change tags metadata as
  cognitive maps needs change
  
• Spring cleaning, project forks, sharing
• How do we add full text (content) search to this?

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Three Key Places for Tagging UI

• Save
• Users are thinking about that object and how it
  fits in their ontology
  
• Explore
• Users need to visualize their ontology and
  identify the tags to quickly get to their stuff
  
• Best place for tag organization/ management
• Open
• Basically the same as Explore, but is tuned for a
  specific task

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Related Projects

• Grand Central
• Focusing on communication now, but encounters
  many of the same challenges
  
• Szafir (Social Computing Group)
• Using WinFS to drive CFD Explorer
• Focused on Explorer Open experience
• Longhorn
• UI for everything is still quite tentative,
  largely metadata driven. WinFS will only include
  a subset of files on a machine

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External Outlook Crawl

• 133 Outlook Users (non-MS)
• Huge variety in depth breadth of folder
  hierarchies
  
• Total branches (folders)
• Med14, Max810