Keith Instone

Last month I attended the ASIS&T 2008 annual meeting. I have attended all of the IA Summits (also by ASIS&T) but this was my first "annual meeting." I typed up some notes during the conference, but wanted to wait to compose my thoughts and reflect a little longer. Here ya go.

Highlights for me:

• I liked spending time with colleagues that I have not seen in years. Like: Gary Marchionini and Cathy Marshall, to name just a few. I caught up on their research, they caught up on the challenges for my job.
• I got some IBM work done, meeting David Millen and connecting some of his research to ibm.com initiatives. It still pays to find IBMers by going to (outside) conferences.
• Both plenary sessions helped me think outside my ibm.com box and see how the rest of the world is using the Internet these days. For example, the Digital Youth Project report has now been officially released. Check it out.
• Strengthened/made local connections, such as old colleagues at IAKM and LexisNexis, new ones at OCLC and Wayne State.

So, net, it was worth attending, for sure. Any time I can drive a few hours and hang out with fellow user experience professionals who have traveled here from around the world, I will be there. I do all I can to support UX-related gatherings in the midwest.

What I found really interesting about the event (neither good nor bad, just different), were the elements that made it a meeting first and a conference second. When I compare it with other professional association annual gatherings that I have been to (like the CHI conference by SIGCHI and UPA's conference), then I notice some things that stand out here:

• Business and committee meetings, special interest group planning and other things to "do the business of ASIS&T". These things happen at "conferences" too but they were more prominent here.
• The "intellectually stimulating" content (the conference part) is driven by the ASIS&T org chart. Special interest groups, in this case, sponsor the panels, seminars, etc. In other association events, I think the sessions are more driven by individuals, not "each SIG organizes their own track".
• Lots of fellowship, awards and recognitions. Since this was my first ASIS&T meeting, it sort of felt like my first big reunion with my wife's extended family. I only knew a subset of people, I did not get all of the inside jokes or the personalities, but everyone was very welcoming and wanted me to come back for next year's get-together.

I can see how this type of annual event builds up loyalty. Come to one meeting and you could get "hooked", volunteering for all sorts of worthwhile ASIS&T activities for the next 12 months. You will almost have to attend the following year.

The meeting-focus does provide some challenges for the "technical program" side of the event, however. There is a lot of competition for compelling conference content, and when people ask me "where can I go to really stretch my brain for a week?" then it will be hard to recommend this conference over the many other choices. Making the conference sessions better would also help draw in some "outsiders" (non members), which would hopefully lead to some getting "hooked", and so on.

Which leads me to my only real complaint about the conference. To be blunt: There were too many academics on stage talking for too long. There were not enough researchers from companies on the panels. There were not enough practitioners giving their views. Most sessions did not leave enough time for audience questions and conversations.

I really do not hate academics - I love them, actually. I knew this would meeting would be research and academic focused, I was looking forward to that aspect. I had some great conversations with professors and students (at the SIGUSE symposium, in the hallways, at lunch and at the poster sessions.) But it was too unbalanced for me. If you know me, you know I do not bitch that often, and I only do it because I care and I want to make things better. So let me offer these suggestions for future technical sessions at the annual meeting:

• Each research-oriented panel must have at least 1 member who does not work at a university. A researcher from IBM, Microsoft, some other organization, who talks about the topic from their company's point of view.
• Each panel must have at least 1 practitioner to act as a sounding board. "I hear what you are saying and here is how I deal with it in my world" sort of thing. Get more practitioners up on stage.
• Encourage people to follow "best practices" for presenting. Like: more pictures and less text on slides. Take "clarification" questions during their talk and leave lots of time for discussion after. Provide an overview (only) up front and leave the details for Q&A (so if no one cares about your details, we do not have to hear them).
• When a student is presenting their research, do not allow their advisor on stage. The advisor can only help answer questions after the student has done their best. I do not mind going to a session where students are presenting their work, but I want the students thinking on their feet and answering questions, I do not want their professors explaining things for them.

The research/practitioner divide was exacerbated for me because of the gap between the SIG Information Architecture community and the ASIS&T membership as a whole. That fracture runs deep and goes beyond the ASIS&T annual meeting, so I do not want to get into it here. Those things will get addressed.

I had the honor of presenting one of the keynotes at yesterday's SIG USE annual research symposium (part of the 2008 ASIS&T annual meeting in Columbus). The theme was "Future Directions: Information Behavior in Design & the Making of Relevant Research."

I took on the task of giving SIG USE feedback "from the outside" with these two perspectives:

• Human-computer interaction, information architecture and general user experience professional. What is this thing called "human information behavior (HIB) research" and how does it relate to the research disciplines I am familiar with?
• Practitioner. What can practitioners learn from HIB and apply to their challenges? How do we bridge the research/practice gaps?

I broke my talk down into 3 sections:

• About me and my journey to gain an initial understanding of HIB
• An analysis of the symposium position papers, where I tried to distill them down into both "how do we connect with designers" and the specific research they are doing which I might be able to apply to my "finding information" challenges
• Stories about things I work on for ibm.com, with the hope that they could spur some ideas for some research topics

Download a PDF of my slides (2 meg). I deleted / cleaned up a few things for the public archive. And usual disclaimer: slides geared for the presentation. If you were not there, they may not be very interesting.

I sped through the slides and talked too fast, but I think (hope) that I put forth some good questions for the SIG USE community to debate going forward. The individual discussions and small group work after my talk were very valuable to me. I have some more reading to do (such as information encountering) and contacts of "SIG USE people" who I can stay in touch with. Looking forward to it!

One final note: I can see why SIG USE wins awards from ASIS&T. Very well run.

I will be attending the Collaborative Sensemaking workshop at the HCIL symposium on Friday. I have not been in the "research groove" for about a decade (since I was still at BGSU), but collaborative sensemaking is one research topic that seems to apply to what we are doing on ibm.com and what information architects do every day. So I thought it was worth coming to the workshop to give my practitioner's perspective - and learn more.

I'll report later with more information (after I get back from vacation...).

In the June 2007 Communications of the ACM (Vol 50 #6), Ben Shneiderman has a "Viewpoint" article that hits close to home. "Web science: A provocative invitation to computer science," subtitled "Here's how it can awaken computer science to the interdisciplinary possibilities of the Web's socially embedded computing technology."

I have written about various pieces that Ben mentions (Web science and IA, universal usability, IBM's services science, as examples) but he has tied them together better. And added a wrinkle that I was not concerned with (until now): how to invigorate computer science programs by adopting the Web science framework.

I am not really in touch with the specific woes of computer science, but I can see how the social perspective would make CS research a lot more relevant. Studying social networks instead of computer networks. Researching e-government instead of compilers. Student projects on sharing animation instead of rendering algorithms. Focusing on users instead of computers.

Ben's other main point is that web science can help create a synergy for more interdisciplinary research. Emerging applications like Web 2.0, universal usability and ubiquitous computing are all natural fits under Web science (that traditional computer scientists would likely say are outside their scope).

Ben ends with: "Visionaries say it is time for a change, but will the traditional computer science community accept the invitation? I hope it will."

This CACM article is not online yet but will eventually be in the CACM section of the ACM Digital Library. Here are the references and other mentions from the article while you wait. (Some links lead to summary pages where you need membership to get the full article.)

1. Japan Prize Commemorative Lecture
2. Foundations and trends in web science
3. Creating a science of the web
4. A research manifesto for services science
5. The social life of innovation
6. Crisis and opportunity in computer science (PDF)
7. Leonardo's Laptop
8. 911.gov
9. Web Science Research Initiative

Other reform movements

• Georgia Tech's New Face of Computing
• i-schools

Related to the IA research agenda from the IA Summit, now comes the Web Science Research Initiative with its plans for "web science" and a web research agenda:

There is...a growing realization among many researchers that a clear research agenda aimed at understanding the current, evolving, and potential Web is needed. ...The Web is an engineered space created through formally specified languages and protocols. However, because humans are the creators of Web pages and links between them, their interactions form emergent patterns in the Web at a macroscopic scale. These human interactions are, in turn, governed by social conventions and laws. Web science, therefore, must be inherently interdisciplinary; its goal is to both understand the growth of the Web and to create approaches that allow new powerful and more beneficial patterns to occur.

I know, the web is not IA and IA is not the web, but I see many similarities. For example, from Creating a Science of the Web, I see topics that interest me as an information architect:

• moving from text documents to data resources
• reuse of information
• "policy aware" systems

The Framework for Web Science has more about this research agenda. Where would an IA research agenda overlap, where would it differ?

(Josh has more excerpts, links, and his social web design angle.)

Karl Fast's The Confluence of Research and Practice in Information Architecture is a recap of IA and research from the summit. If you were at the panel discussion you will remember Karl as the guy in the audience who had more / better stuff to say than those of us on the panel.

I like his point about the difference between researchers and academics, and I look forward to the 2007 Summit.

In the week following the IA research panel, I have uncovered a few more things of interest. First and foremost, I found a good place to publish your IA research. Check out the blog for people interested in contributing to the HICSS-40 minitrack on Using Information: New Technologies. The blog is being used to help coordinate the submissions for the conference.

The call for participation lists many beloved IA topics, like social tagging, content analysis, search and access mechanisms, and use of rich media. "Media literacy" - that sounds like a key item to go into the IA Research Agenda.

I think this will be a great venue for IA issues. I must admit, however, that I have never attended HICSS. It is 40 years old, but I have not looked at the proceedings much in the last decade. I am pretty sure it is one of those "every one who attends has a paper" conferences (which is fine with me). Back when I was doing research in the early 90's, I recall some decent papers from this event - not as high quality as some other conferences. With Dan Russell and Jonathan Grudin organizing this minitrack of papers, then I am sure these papers will be good.

I see lots of other things of interest to information architects. The mini-track on Using Information is part of the Digital media track with other minitracks like information retrieval and search effectiveness. There are also parts of other tracks on HCI, socialware, semantic web and many knowledge management topics. There will be lots to keep an IA engaged.

June 15, 2006 is the deadline to submit. I plan on submitting something myself, if I can get the OK to travel. Hawaii in January sounds too good to be true!

I participated in the panel "Setting the IA research agenda" at the IA Summit in Vancouver yesterday. Great talks by the panelists (of course), but more importantly, excellent participation from the audience and a good birds-of-a-feather at the end of the day. See my presentation, background information, and other notes.

In a few years, will this panel be seen as an important kick-off to an IA research agenda, or will it be seen as just another event where we talked about "IA research" but did nothing about it?

I participated in the "Setting the IA Research Agenda" panel on Saturday, March 25, 2006 at the IA Summit. Here is an overview of my points, with links to background information I compiled in prepration for the panel, as well as some of my notes. A copy of my presentation is attached below.

Fellow panelists: Don Turnbull (panel organizer), Peter Morville, Jamie Blustein.

What is Research?

• "Active, diligent, and systematic process of inquiry aimed at discovering, interpreting and revising facts" (from Wikipedia entry on Research)
• Also, a collection of information about a particular subject

• Basic research: to further knowledge for knowledge's sake
• Applied research: producing results that may be applied to real world situations ("Research phase" within our ordinary projects)

• Exploratory: to help define the problem
• Constructive: develop a solution to a problem
• Empirical: collect data to test hypotheses (see scientific method)

• Research methods (a sample): Action research, Case study, Observation, Intuition, Interview, Data analysis, Simulations & models, Controlled experiments

Examples of IA empirical research:

• Peter Morville's September 2004 review of the literature with sections on Information seeking behavior, Structure and organization, Navigation, Search
• Larson & Czerwinski, CHI 98, Implications of memory, structure and scent or information retrieval (PDF)
• Yee, Swearingen, Li, Hearst, CHI 2003, Faceted metadata for image search and browsing (PDF)
• Bernard, Developing Schemas for the Location of Common Web Objects

What is a Research Agenda?

Agenda

• A list or outline of things to be considered or done (e.g., meetings)
• An underlying often ideological plan or program (e.g., political)

Research agenda

• List of things you want to see researched
• A bunch of questions you want answered
• Structured list of issues, that when researched, will serve some greater goal

Examples of some of my IA work where I include research agenda questions:

• Breadcrumbs
• Faceted browsing
• Personalization

In November, 2004, Peter Van Dijck posted A research agenda for information architecture with follow-up comments from various mailing lists. His research agenda included: Cognitive science (categories, search terms), Business theory (process model), Social Science & Anthropology (information sharing). Donna Maurer later posted that Maybe we do need IA research with these agenda items: Genre, Cognition and categorization, Facets (mental model, UI elements), Re-finding information.

A sampling of existing research agendas that are related to information architecture:

• Hypermedia, semantic web: Hypermedia and the Semantic Web: A Research Agenda: Links vs. relationships, Embedded links, Time-based hypermedia, CSCW
• American Library Association: Research Agenda for Library Instruction and Information Literacy: Learners, Teaching, Organizational context, Assessment
• Gartner: Enterprise Architecture Research Agenda Set for 2005: Management and Governance, Trends and Directions, Methods and Tools, Architecture in Practice by Industry, Cultural and Organizational Issues
• ACM, Human-computer interaction: Strategic directions in HCI: Strategic themes (Universal access to info, Education/learning, E-commerce, End-user programming, Information Visualization, Computer-mediated communication), Technological trends (Ubiquitous computing, Hardware, Natural modalities, VR), Design & evaluation methods, Tools
• Digital libraries: Interoperability, Scaling, and the Digital Libraries Research Agenda, Research Agenda for the Intelligent Digital Library, Metadata for Digital Libraries: a Research Agenda
• Shneiderman: Universal usability: Technology variety (supporting a broad range of hardware, software, and network access), User diversity (accommodating users with different skills, knowledge, age, gender, disabilities, disabling conditions, literacy, culture, income), Gaps in user knowledge (bridging the gap between what users know and what they need to know)

How would these overlap with an IA research agenda? How were these agendas built? How do they relate to funding?

Research agendas will have a lot of overlap with curricula. For example, the HCI "inventory of topics" figure from the ACM SIGCHI CDG gives the same overview of the field that a research agenda would provide.

A small sampling of IA curricula:

• Kent State IAKM: Information architecture, Information use, Knowledge management
• Indiana University SLIS - MIS: IA & design, HCI & communication, Strategic infomation management and leadership, Information retrieval systems design
• University of Texas - Austin IA Proposed Curriculum (PDF)

The punch line: Treat the IA Research Agenda as an IA project

• A research agenda is a framework for classifying existing research and (more importantly) planning future research
• Research agendas have an IA
• Apply our IA methods to create an IA research agenda

My notes

My notes from the discussion during the panel session, the BOF later in the day, lunch conversations, etc.

• Don's slides (insert link here)
• Peer reviewing: nice-to-have for me (helps filter the research) but I am also interested in less polished research
• A journal is neccesary but not sufficient
• What are the boundaries of the field?
• Jamie's slides
• Hypertext's aims and goals match pretty well to IA's
• Tenure challenges are key, IA research needs to be recognized for tenure
• Peter's notes are on flickr
• Agenda must be bigger than findability
• Yes, we do need IA research
• Label it "IA research" - semantics matter
• Good sign: practitioners getting stalked by graduate students
• Basic vs. Applied research
• Closet research literature review in industry
• Good sources of IA research: ACM DL, JASIST
• Karl Fast's comments: Agenda is about asking the RIGHT questions, respecting other disciplines
• One goal for an agenda: $50mil grant from NSF
• Information literacy as a key agenda item (long term , hard to do)
• usability.gov and SURL as examples of making research usable by practitioners
• "Best practices" may be all that we need for the current set of problems
• Tools to help with IA research (e.g., a way to analyze web page layouts across a lot of sites)
• Directory of IA researchers: list of people who are doing research, updated overview of each project, easy to contact them
• Takes special skills to summarize research for a practitioner (researcher cannot do it)

Panel coverage

Blog entries and other discussions of this panel. If you know of others, please add them as comments - thanks!

• Abe Crystal's report on the Summit includes the panel. "I believe integrating and applying social and behavioral science results to IA problems could reinvigorate both IA practice and social science research."
• The confluence of research and practice in information architecture - Karl Fast's recap of research at the IA Summit.

The Hypermedia Research and the World Wide Web Workshop was held at Hypertext '96 in March of 1996. The overall purpose of the workshop was to set the stage for better communication between the hypermedia research community and the Web development community. Below is information about the workshop and some of the results of it. Update September 3, 2005: I pulled a few key files out of my archives and added to my new site.

Participant position papers

Applying Hypermedia Research to the World Wide Web

By Keith Andrews, Graz University of Technology, Austria. Drawing upon experience with Hyper-G, Keith points out the need for external link databases to help alleviate some of the Web's current problems.

An Evaluation of the World Wide Web as a Platform for Electronic Commerce

By Dan Connolly, World Wide Web Consortium. Dan evaluates the architecture and implementation of the Web with respect to Douglas Engelbart's requirements for an open hyperdocument system, which are derived from experience in using CSCW to support large scale electronic commerce.

A Web of Objects

By Paul De Bra, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. Paul describes how, by using object oriented database technology for the storage level of Web servers, it is possible to incorporate many features envisioned by some well-known hypertext reference models. Unlike Hyper-G, this would preserve the architecture of the Web.

Extended Linking Facilities for the WWW

By Gary Hill, University of Southampton, UK. Gary talks about how, by adding some of the features of Microcosm to the Web, authoring facilities and navigation would be improved. The Distributed Link Service is presented as an example.

Research on Usability-Based Facilities for WWW Browsers

By Stewart N. T. Shen, Old Dominion University, USA. With a focus on developing browser features based on user needs (as opposed to advertiser needs), Stewart describes ways to assist beginning users, how to help experienced users find their favorite sites, and how to make it easier to create personal annotations.

Structured Web Site Design

By Daniel Schwabe, PUC-Rio, Brazil. Daniel describes the Object-Oriented Hypermedia Design Model and demonstrates how it can be applied to a World Wide Web site. OOHDM is comprised of four incremental and iterative activities, each of which involves building a set of object-oriented models.

World Wide Web Benefits and Dangers for (Traditional) Hypermedia Research

By Andreas Dieberger, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. Andreas focuses on three main issues: navigation (applying navigation research to the Web), the user interface (the Web as a globalized user interface) and prototyping (using the Web for hypermedia research). He stresses some of the problems of applying existing research to the Web and using the Web for hypermedia research.

The Eastgate Web Squirrel

By Mark Bernstein, Eastgate Systems. Mark describes Web Squirrel, software to help users manange all of their Internet resources. It is a great example of how hypermedia research can be applied to the Web, since research on spatial hypertexts was applied to Web Squirrel.

Simplicity and Extensibility: What we can learn from the Web

By Roy Fielding, University of California, Irvine, USA. As a Web developer (Roy wrote the HTTP specification), he first asks why he even wants to be at the workshop. Although the position paper is not completed yet, you can gather from the outline and title that its focus is on explaining why the Web has been successful and how it will continue to be successful. It is simple by design and extensible by design. So, incorporating more hypermedia research won't be that hard. In fact, the designers are waiting for the help, in some sense. Just be careful to avoid the "non-solutions" that come about if you don't understand the social context of the Web.

Report on the workshop (by me)

(A version of this report appeared in the June, 1996, issue of the SIGLINK Newsletter.)

A one-day workshop at Hypertext '96 on Hypermedia Research and the World Wide Web was held March 17 in Washington, DC. I organized the workshop and was very anxious during the position paper phase before the conference: I had sent out over 30 personal invitations, but nobody was willing to participate in my workshop. I was beginning to wonder if I was the only person who saw this huge gap between the World Wide Web and hypermedia research communities. I even thought about canceling the workshop because of lack of interest. But after extending the submission deadline as late as possible and making a few more contacts, I was finally able to get a good group of participants together and the workshop was held. Below are some notes of what transpired.

As it turns out, the reason few people could attend my workshop was NOT because they did not also see this problem. Rather, everyone was already talking about it in other places. For example, both of the other workshops at Hypertext '96 spent time talking about these same issues. The discussion I had with others in the hallway during the technical program also told me that I was on the right track and the hypermedia community was beginning to feel like it should take some action to forge a closer tie to the Web community. Many people re-iterated the same questions: "Why aren't the Web developers looking at the existing research? Why are they reinventing the wheel?" I agree that the Web community is not paying close enough attention to the existing research, but since the workshop (and after addressing similar issues at CHI 96) I have developed comeback questions for these: "Why isn't the hypermedia research community more active in the Web? Why aren't they submitting more papers to the Web conferences? Why aren't they applying their research to the Web to show how useful their research is?" It is a two-way street, folks.

Anyway, back to the workshop. I had three main goals for the workshop:

1. bring together hypermedia researchers and Web developers
2. document hypermedia research's role in current Web development
3. lay out the Web's role in future hypermedia research

Goal #1 was accomplished, even though I did not get the 50/50 mix of hypermedia and Web people that I wanted. Representing the hypermedia research side were:

• Keith Andrews, Graz University of Technology and Hyper-G
• Paul De Bra, professor at Einhoven University of Technology
• Gary Hill, University of Southampton and Microcosm
• Stewart Shen, Old Dominion University
• Daniel Schwabe, PUC-Rio
• Andreas Dieberger, Georgia Institute of Technology and MOO/MUD navigation expert
• Mark Bernstein, well-known researcher and conference organizer from Eastgate Systems
• Marvin Pollard, graduate student at the School of Library and Information Studies at Florida State University

Representing the Web side were two big-time experts, fortunately for us:

• Dan Connolly, who works for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C is the "referee" in the competitive game between Web vendors) and writer of the HTML specification
• Roy Fielding, graduate student at the University of California-Irvine and author of the HTTP specification (Actually, Roy could go in either camp, but he is more well-known for his HTTP work than his research in hypermedia-based software engineering environments, so I classify him as a Web expert in this context)

I want to publicly thank all participants, but especially Dan and Roy, since not many members of the Web community have realized that the hypermedia researchers do indeed have valuable things to contribute to the development of the Web.

The participants submitted position papers before the workshop. Everyone was given some time at the workshop to state their positions. We had worthwhile discussions on many topics. But what was most interesting was when one of the hypermedia researchers would identify a need for the Web (such as typed links) and then either Dan or Roy would come back with "It has already been specified, has been part of the Web definition for years, but we are just waiting from the vendors to implement it". It made me realize that you cannot get a good understanding of how the Web might evolve by simply looking at what Netscape Navigator does today and reading people's poorly-designed personal pages. You have to read the specs, see what new standards are being proposed, and you have to demonstrate to the vendors why they should implement some old feature from another hypermedia system. Why doesn't Netscape do typed links yet? Because their customers haven't told them they want typed links yet. Because Netscape does not see any financial reason to do typed links yet. It is up to the hypermedia research community to demonstrate to Netscape that typed links are good for users and for publishers and that they could sell more software if it utilized typed links.

Anyway, back to the workshop. Goals #2 and #3 were sort of merged together during the workshop. After the presentations, our discussion focused on "opportunities for improving the Web", a nice way of saying that in some ways the Web sucks. But the difference between saying "it sucks" and "here's how to make it even better" are important and crucial to getting people to listen to you. No one wants to hear a bunch of "old farts" whine about the "good old days." But companies are ALWAYS willing to listen to how they can enhance their products to make more money. So, we discussed different ways to improve the Web, being sure to mention both the existing research which suggests this is a good idea, and the existing Web specifications which would make realizing this opportunity possible today. We had to keep in mind that our audience for this list of opportunities was not other researchers, but rather the people at the big companies that are shaping the Web.

But we did not have nearly enough time. So, writing up the list of opportunities has been left as a post-workshop exercise. We have made some progress so far, but the going has been tougher than I anticipated. The first problem we ran into was specifying all of the things that need to be considered when suggesting an improvement. One should not just implement a new feature without considering the implications on the infrastructure of the Web, the users, and everything in between. Even the very best idea probably would not be worth it if it had huge, negative effects on network bandwidth and browsers, for example. You have to understand the entire Web to be able to make this kind of cost/benefit analysis. So, we came up with a template to fill out for each opportunity, being sure to include sections for existing research and existing Web specifications. There is also a heavy emphasis on users.

We also have a long, unorganized list of opportunities. The list needs to have different overlays on top so that opportunities are grouped in different ways. And each opportunity still needs to be expanded. But I feel this is quickly becoming too much for our little group of participants to handle. We could use some help from others, so if you see an opportunity that tickles your fancy, feel free to take charge of it and develop its criteria. If your opportunity involves the HTTP protocol, contact Roy to see what he thinks. If your opportunity might be implemented in HTML, contact Dan because he understands the history behind HTML and knows what is likely to come in the future.

Our goal is to get the W3C to put its "rubber stamp" on this document and have it presented to its members (the big vendors).

Also, one other document that we want to produce from the workshop is a reading list for Web developers: the key papers and books that they could read to make them aware of the larger field of hypermedia research and to make it easier for them to apply some of it to the Web. This list has not been compiled yet, so feel free to contribute your ideas. Send them to me.

So, in summary, the seed has been planted for better communication between the hypermedia research community and the Web community. But both sides will have to work hard to water and weed the plant to ensure that it will grow, bear fruit, and prosper. Please help out!