Collaboration
How can a text analysis portal encourage and support collaboration? One of the differences between an online portal and a software environment is that a portal not only provides functionality, but also provides a context for collaboration. On a portal users can both complete tasks and collaborate with each other while doing so (and in doing so.)
Types of Collaboration
Collaboration is between people or teams. We can classify the different types of collaboration by the roles of people when they enter collaboration.
- Developer collaboration - the collaboration between developers
- Developer-Researcher collaboration - the collaboration between developers and researchers to develop tools that will work for a research purpose
- Collections-Developer collaboration - the collaboration between editors of e-text collections and text analysis developers
- Research collaboration - the collaborations between researchers
- Instructional collaboration - collaborations around the teaching of new researchers
Developers: What can we do to help developer collaboration?
A portal like
TAPoR should provide developers ways to find each other, to share tools with others, and to make tools interoperable. Some of the ways
TAPoR aims to support collaboration among developers are:
- TAML (Text Analysis Markup Language) - by developing an interprocess markup language for tools such that results from one tool can be passed for reliable processing to another.
- Web Services - by providing support for accessible and documented processes for other developers to call.
- Documentation - by providing documentation for the adaption of legacy tools
- Promotion - by providing an environment where tools can be registered so that others can find them and experiment with them
- Discussion - by providing an environment where developers can exchange ideas and code.
Researchers: What can we do to help research collaboration?
A portal should be a place where researchers can collaborate. At present the
TAPoR portal has limited collaboration tools, but more are planned. Currently we are developing the following:
- News System - TAPoR allows advanced users to create news channels that can have multiple authors and multiple publication forms (from RSS feeds to e-mail lists.) This allows a team to keep in touch.
- Private/Public - TAPoR allows one to share electronic texts and tools with others by making them public.
Some of the collaboration opportunities we plan to offer are:
- We are developing a wiki (this one) for the Text Analysis Developers Alliance, many sections of which are to help researchers discover what they can do and what others are doing with text analysis methods.
- We will add a project publication feature which allows a project (a collection of texts and tools) to be published as a web site which others can use. This will allow a group to share a research space.
- We will add a chat feature.
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GeoffreyRockwell - 09 May 2005
