Philosophical Foundation
- Target user is a dedicated knowledge worker interested in becoming ever more intimate and skilled with their information and tools and doing serious work.
- As such, the system is primarily designed as a responsive desktop system with a large high resolution display, for the fully engaged knowledge professional, not the casual button-clicker. Though it will eventually have a mobile incarnation, that will not be the first focus.
- The visual interface should be ‘skinnable’ so it can easily be personalized to suit various needs and users.
- The visual relationships between information units is inherently multidimensional, not 2D or 3D and as such the user needs powerful controls for specifying how the relationships, and which relationships, should be displayed.
- The project takes as a principle that it is not information which is most fundamental, but interactions, and as such, rich interactivity should be the focus of sustained focus.
- Multiple views in dynamic ways of Doug information and external information, with suggestions and controls by both author and reader.
- As this platform evolves, we “power users” will coevolve our practices, conventions, mental models, success criteria, etc. so that we co-inform the Doug evolution as it informs our coevolution.
Infrastructure Requirements
- An open, extensible document format.
- Core specifications for rich tagging of time-related events.
- A focus on robust, rich links.
Collaboration Focus
- Support collaboration in small teams of individuals who know each other.
- Support collaboration in very large teams.
• Sharing in meaningful ways.
Co-Evolution of Powerful Systems
• Built as high performance applications for primary use on desktop and mobile devices.
• Specialised code for viewing and interactions, not just off-the-shelf libraries, to ensure performance at least as high performance as modern immersive games. This will include high performance text rendering and manipulation engines.
• Not one monolithic application but a suite, where the APIs and document format is open, so that anyone can build a ‘competing’ application.
• Rich use of emerging interactions, such as aero-connections, gloves, VR, AR, haptic, audio, glance, tongue, ambient and so on.
• Evolving document format which is open for anyone to add features to so that it can support added features in a new piece of software, without having to notify or update legacy applications.
• Hybrid desktop and server model: All users have the (encouraged) option to installing DKR2 on a server as well as their private machine. The server component can be a fully active install or passive, through DropBox and similar services. The distributed server architecture will then provide the same level of server at least, as a commercial single site system, becoming a distributed, non-centrally-controlled network with peer-to-peer redundancy.
Integration With Legacy Systems
• Plugins/Extensions where they can be useful, such as in web browsers and system level, to extract more information when moving information into the DKR system.
• When sharing outside the DKR system, will provide as much meta-data in whatever format is being shared, to make it richer when coming back into a DKR system.
• Web access for supplemental access.
Primary Interactions/Applications
• Reading a rich document in linear form and in alternative forms, including 2D/3D concept map spaces.
• Authoring documents individually and collaboratively.
• Doing research within and outside of Doug.
• Publishing in rich formats within and outside Doug.
• Tracking resources and discussions which are not explicitly in the Doug documents.
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