Eugene Eric Kim <eekim@eekim.com>, February 8, 2001, v1.1
Here are some knowledge work scenarios that use the Open Hyperdocument System's Use Cases and requirements. Not all of them have been elaborated, and I'm sure there are many more I haven't even thought about. As always, contributions and feedback are encouraged. 1A (02)
Reading e-mail essentially falls under the Hyperscope Use Case "View document." You should be able to customize the views of both individual messages and entire archives and threads. 2A1 (05)
[Use Cases: 06 View document, 09 Customize view] 2A2 (06)
If an e-mail repository is considered a document, then sending e-mail could be thought of as adding new nodes to other people's e-mail repository documents. Sending e-mail can also be considered the equivalent of publishing a document. 2B1 (08)
[Use Cases: 026 Create document, 028 Revise document, 035 Publish/share document] 2B2 (09)
If an e-mail repository is considered a document, then receiving e-mail could be thought of as adding new nodes to the e-mail repository "document." 2C1 (011)
[Use Cases: 028 Revise document] 2C2 (012)
[Use Cases: 042 Delete document] 2D1 (014)
If an e-mail repository is considered a document, then displaying new messages could be thought of as displaying all new nodes added to the e-mail repository "document." 2E1 (016)
[Use Cases: 09 Customize views, 045 Categorize document] 2E2 (017)
When you respond to an e-mail, a link to the e-mail you are responding to is generated. Note that this should resolve the annoying habit of most e-mail clients attaching the entire e-mail message to the bottom of the response, whether or not any parts of that message are being cited. 2F1 (019)
[Use Cases: 013 Link documents] 2F2 (020)
A form of linking a response to the original e-mail already occurs at a document-level with most e-mail clients, using the "In-Reply-To" header and the "Message-ID" as the document's address. 2F3 (021)
Often, when replying to an e-mail, you cite and respond to specific passages in that e-mail. The citation is in the form of quoted text, usually prefixed by a special character, such as a less than sign "<". With the OHS, citations can be in the form of links. This maintains a machine-readable assocation between the cited passage and the response. 2G1 (023)
A common practice when responding to long e-mails is to split a response into multiple e-mails, one per major concept. Another practice is to respond to multiple messages at once. Under current e-mail paradigms, this makes it easier to follow discussion as it happens, but it makes it far more difficult to sort through archives afterwards. Using citation links should prevent these problems and possibly obviate these practices. 2G2 (024)
The citation link may point to a document that is not currently retrievable. For example, the user may have deleted the original e-mail. As a result, it may be desirable to include the text of the citation within the link. 2G3 (025)
A traditional thread view is possible by asking the system to generate a tree of messages based on "reply" links. This tree could be expanded and contracted, just like any other outline view. However, even more interesting thread views are possible with granular reply links. Suppose someone makes a statement in an e-mail, and you only want to see replies to that e-mail. You can do that using granular reply links, thus filtering out all of the irrelevant messages and even including messages that may not be considered part of the message thread. 2H1 (027)
[Use Cases: 09 Customize views, 023 Follow link] 2H2 (028)
The latency for displaying, expanding, and contracting nodes must be very, very small. One of the major problems with web-based e-mail archives versus locally stored e-mail archives is that the Web latency really makes it very hard to view discussion threads and messages quickly. 2H4 (030)
[Use Cases: 038 Annotate/comment on document] 2I1 (032)
Store e-mail for later perusal. 2J1 (034)
The system should use a distributed storage scheme that wwould allow you to store documents on other servers. This would be useful for things like mailing lists archives, which are often already archived on a centralized server. It would be nice to be able to read and respond to these messages stored centrally using your own MUA. 2J2 (035)
It would be nice to cache threads and individual messages from mailing list archives stored somewhere else for disconnected use and for reading and responding with your own MUA. 2J3 (036)
[Use Cases: 045 Categorize document] 2K1 (038)
Most mail systems have the following features for categorizing e-mail: the status header, the subject header, and folders. The status header indicates new mail, read mail, and answered mail. The subject header is a user-defined field. Unfortunately, the default behavior of most MUAs is to repeat the subject header for all replies, rendering it essentially useless. Using links for replies will bring back the utility of the subject header. Folders are several e-mail messages stored in a single file name, with the folder name acting as a category. The main problem with folders is the inability to place an e-mail in multiple folders without duplicating the e-mail. 2K2 (039)
People can overlay their own categories on e-mail archives, thus creating multiple and more useful organizations of archives. 2L1 (041)
[Use Cases: 09 Customize view, 045 Categorize document] 2L2 (042)
Some people do this by saving thread messages in a separate folder. Robin Covers did this for a thread on groves. Joe Brenner has also done this for a number of mailing lists. 2L3 (043)
To browse an archive, search for the topics you are interested in. Those should return a list of messages. You can customize the view in order to rapidly determine which of those messages are most relevant. Then, you may follow links to find other relevant e-mails. 2M1 (045)
[Use Cases: 048 Categorize passage] 2N1 (047)
A useful way of organizing an e-mail thread is to generate a regular summary, highlighting the most important points, filtering out some of the less relevant discussion, and linking to the relevant e-mails. Several open source development lists practice this already to good effect: 2O1 (049)
Granular linking and an improved UI for generating these summaries should improve this process greatly. 2O2 (055)
In an effort to highlight an important point that may have gotten lost in a very long e-mail, you may choose to send an e-mail containing the relevant excerpt of that e-mail. Rather than cut and paste, the OHS allows you to simply reuse that passage and send out a new e-mail. 2P1 (057)
[Use Cases: 032 Reuse passage] 2P2 (058)
[Use Cases: 09 Customize view] 2Q1 (060)
[Use Cases: 09 Customize view] 2R1 (062)
Once an e-mail is sent, it's considered published. However, you could edit that e-mail and resend it, essentially republishing a new version of the e-mail. 2S1 (064)
If the nodes in the revised and resent e-mail are properly marked as revisions of nodes of a previous e-mail, you could take advantage of this in your view control of repositories or threads. For example, when selecting a view for a thread, I might ask that the latest revisions of all messages be marked and displayed on top, and that previous revisions of these messages be displayed as children of these messages. 2S2 (065)
[Use Cases: 06 View document] 3A1 (068)
[Use Cases: 026 Create document] 3B1 (070)
[Use Cases: 028 Revise document] 3C1 (072)
[Use Cases: 035 Publish/share document] 3D1 (074)
Bookmarking web pages -- creating an electronic file cabinet for web pages -- is essentially equivalent to linking documents to a bookmark "document." An OHS-enabled bookmarking system would enable annotations, different taxonomies of organization, and granular storage. 3E1 (076)
[Use Cases: 013 Link documents, 045 Categorize document, 048 Categorize passage] 3E2 (077)
Would also be nice to cache pages, as Google does. 3E3 (078)
[Use Cases: 06 View document, 09 Customize view] 3F1 (080)
Link e-mail to patch, one way of providing context for the existence of the patch. With the OHS, you could even potentially replace language-specific comments entirely with linked annotations. 4C1 (085)
When reading a document, I want to know about and possibly view all followup documents, such as revisions, letters to the editor regarding the document, and followup articles. This is possible by viewing all back-links to the document, assuming that followups all link to the original document. 5A1 (090)
[Use Cases: 013 Link documents] 5A2 (091)
You post a document for review, and solicit comments from others. Your reviewers comment on the document by creating links to various parts of the document containing commentary or editing corrections. Link version control and access control allows you to view new and modified comments on a regular basis. 5B1 (0126)
[Use Cases: 06 View document, 013 Create link, 054 Delete link, 057 Edit link] 5B2 (0127)
On several of the mailing lists to which I subscribe, people share interesting and relevant links. Those links could be automatically collected and categorized by a monitor. With back link management, the original e-mails sharing the link along with related threads are associated to each site. This way, Yahoo-like sites with domain-specific taxonomies could easily be generated and maintained. 5C1 (093)
Peer review using back-link management. Link weights. Rate by user (i.e. eBay). Rate by moderator (i.e. Slashdot). 5D1 (095)
[Use Cases: 013 Link documents] 5D2 (096)
[Use Cases: 013 Link documents, 038 Annotate/comment on documents] 5E1 (098)
Someone wants to set up a meeting with you, and proposes a time and location, to which you agree. You add the location to your addressbook, linking the new entry to the e-mail containing the location's address and directions as the source of this information. You then add the appointment to your calendar, linking to the e-mail with the pertinent information and the location entry in your addressbook. 8C1 (0113)
Someone sends an announcement for an interesting lecture, which you wish to attend. You add a new entry in your calendar, and link it to the e-mail. When you check your calendar and you see the scheduled lecture, you can click on the link to retrieve the e-mail to get more information about the lecture. 8C2 (0114)
Similarly, you see an announcement on the Web for an interesting lecture. You add a new entry in your calendar, and link it to the exact passage on the Web page describing the event. 8C3 (0115)
[Use Cases: 013 Link documents] 8C4 (0116)
Suppose you are working on several projects, and have a separate To Do list for each of them. You can create a new document, and transclude the content of all the separate To Do lists, listing each item by priority. 8D1 (0118)
[Use Cases: 013 Link documents, 09 Customize view] 8D2 (0119)
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