In December 1994, we created an MIS Collaboratory
by organizing information
according to our conceptualization of the MIS field. Further, in
conformance with the complementarity theoretic foundation described
earlier, we added an on-line forum for supporting interactions between
MIS academics and professionals. While our prototype only has a subset
of the features outlined in the conceptual model, to the best of our
knowledge, this is the first development allowing global dynamic
interactions on the Web. An important feature of the forum is not only
its ability to display issues and comments (a traditional Web function
as a presenter of information), but its unique capability to allow
users to post comments on these issues and discussions. One can also
post a new issue for discussion by others.
The key feature of the WWW and its browsers that has made it so popular is the ability to combine multiple tasks. A browser like Mosaic or Netscape can be made to handle news and email, or be used to invoke other applications seamlessly. To illustrate this point in the context of collaboration, consider a setting where a particular document is to be annotated. Suppose an MIS professional visiting our site is interested in making comments on a particular research article, and also wishes to follow up on others' observations. In a traditional Web environment, this single action involves at least two parties, namely the user and the Web administrator. For such a user interested in annotating a document, the typical tasks would include the following:
1. Reading the document to be annotated
2. Writing comments about the document
3. Mailing back comments
For a systems administrator, the tasks involved in putting up the document would include:
1. Saving his/her mail as a file.
2. Converting it to a document in the desired form
3. Attaching it to his/her annotation system
All of the above tasks can be done with the available tools on the
Internet. The user could have read the article using a
newsreader/presenter, composed his/her comment/reply using an editor,
and then mailed back the article. Furthermore, if s/he were
interested in receiving comments on his/her annotation, the Web
administrator would have had to post the document back on the Web
server. However to the user, these separate tasks constitute one
related group of actions. Indeed, on our forum (which uses an
annotation system), the above scenario is just one seamless process.
The user looks at a Web page, reads the article, clicks on a hypertext
link that leads him/her to a form; then s/he fills out the comments
and clicks on a button, which automatically executes a Common Gateway
Interface (CGI) script to post the article in the relevant form on the
web page immediately. In this manner, we achieved the interactive
nature of newsgroups, but with the multi-media and linking
capabilities of the WWW. In other words, our forum simulates the
features of Usenet on the WWW, while still allowing users to embed a
variety of different URLs (e.g., Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP),
Gopher, FTP, etc.) links in their comments. These features are, of
course, in addition to incorporating inline images, audio or even
video clips. Some snapshots of the Forum are provided in
Figures 4 and 5.
*********************Put Figure 4 about here*******************
*********************Put Figure 5 about here*******************
In our implementation, the MIS Collaboratory server handles user
requests, and provides a ``back-end'' process for information
organization and interaction. As with any Web architecture, the two
main communication points are at the server and client ends. A HTTP
daemon (httpd) at the server side listens to requests, and a browser
like Mosaic or Netscape at the client end initiates communication and
displays information. We have three key processes at the server end
providing the necessary functionality: CGI processes, search engines,
and organized information repositories.