[Colloq] Fwd: MS Thesis Defense: Viral Gupta-- August 29th

[Diane Keys]

Diane Keys 
Grants Coordinator 
College of Computer & Information Science 
202 West Village H 
617-373-2461 
fax: 617-373-5121 

----- Forwarded Message ----- 
From: "Alexa Del Greco" <alexa at ccs.neu.edu> 
To: "faculty" <faculty at ccs.neu.edu>, "diane" <diane at ccs.neu.edu>, "lackaye" <lackaye at ccs.neu.edu>, "tricia" <tricia at ccs.neu.edu>, "je" <je.wong at neu.edu>, "krissy" <krissy at ccs.neu.edu>, "dhodgkin" <dhodgkin at ccs.neu.edu> 
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2008 1:32:44 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern 
Subject: MS Thesis Defense: Viral Gupta-- August 29th 

Viral Gupta is doing his MS Thesis Defense.  Information follows. 

Fine-Grained Addressability to Support 
Large-Scale Collaborative Document Development 

Friday, August 29, 2008, at 10:00AM in 366 WVH. 

Abstract: The Web has made it possible for large, distributed 
collaborations to develop sophisticated document bases.  As these 
collaborations increase in size, there is a need to support reference, 
navigation and search through the document bases by individuals who 
are not computer professionals.  Although collaborative tools such as 
wikis have been developed that address some of the requirements of 
these communities, the tools lack support for simple and convenient 
fine-grained addressability to parts of the documents.  Such 
addressability is essential for formal documents, such as standards 
and legal documents.  In this thesis we develop a solution to the 
problem of fine-grained addressability that is based on MediaWiki, a 
popular and powerful collaboration tool that is the software 
infrastructure for Wikipedia.  Although some collaboration tools that 
support fine-grained addressability already exist, they have not 
addressed some of the open research issues of fine-grained 
addressability, such as dealing with transclusion, semantic annotation 
and hyperscope support.  It also deals with the research problems that 
were raised by this goal.  An architecture and reference 
implementation was developed to provide a proof of concept and to test 
the viability of the proposed solutions to the research problems.  The 
thesis also discusses the various design decisions that were made in 
the course of solving the research problems and developing the 
reference implementation. 

Advisor: Ken Baclawski