This paper focuses on police investigations conducted by small teams of officers as they usually work on solving violent crimes. Collaboration and communication are important aspects as well as connecting pieces of information that become known to the officers over time. This is an important application domain of knowledge management, and in particular hypertext. We present a prototypic application, Socs, that permits the intuitive connecting of information on a space. It supports emergent and dynamic knowledge structures, fosters communication, awareness and notification services, enables multiple trails of thought in parallel (i. e., thought experiments), as well as versioning with easy access to previous states. As a complement to the database and network analysis driven applications available today, we propose a tool for criminal profiling or crime scene analysis supporting small teams of officers in knowledge structuring and collaboration.

Law enforcement officers deal with various challenges regarding the management of information during an investigation. New information comes in frequently, some of it is uncertain, incorrect, or incomplete. Officers should be supported in developing interpretations of the provided information. Furthermore, it is beneficial (and demanded by some investigation methodologies) to record the progression of the analysis. In order to fulfill these requirements, we propose a spatial hypertext-based application, as part of an open framework. This enhances collaborative work on uncertain, incomplete, and frequently changing information structures and provides access to other applications used in investigations.

Based on the emergent nature of terrorist groups, we propose spatial hypertext as a tool for intelligence analysts for representing, reasoning upon, and communicating information. Furthermore, we evaluate awareness as an important feature for analysts to realise hidden associations between various people or objects. Finally, we discuss our prototype Socs, a general spatial structure application with high level support for awareness, under the umbrella of intelligence analysis requirements.

Summary form only given. A new model of dependence centrality is proposed. The centrality measure is based on shortest paths between the pair of nodes. We apply this measure with demonstration of small network example. The comparisons are made with betweenness centrality. We discuss how investigative world / intelligence agencies could be benefited from the proposed measure.

A novel approach for robust restructurable/reconfigurable control synthesis is proposed using a model-matching approach. Based on an augmented system structured by the nominal control system and the faulty system, the objective of restructure/reconfigurable control synthesis is to minimize the difference between the transfer matrix of the reconfigured closed-loop system and that of the nominal closed-loop system in the Hinfin-norm sense, under the constraint that the reconfigured system should be internally stable. Besides regarding the control redesign as a kind of reconfigurable control approach, the control mixer concept is used for synthesis of a restructurable control. The robust control methods, Hinfinand mu synthesis techniques, are employed for these restructurable/reconfigurable control syntheses. The reconfigured system performance, stability and robustness are shown to be guaranteed when some conditions are satisfied. The proposed approach is also extended to deal with parametric and additive faults as well as the case with system uncertainties

Support for customization is an important capability in the information world faced by knowledge workers today. It can be an important tool in helping them to find, access, and work with the information they require to perform their tasks. This is especially true in a collaborative setting. This paper describes a customization architecture specifically designed for knowledge workers. It examines the current status of the architecture and a prototype system based upon it, with an emphasis on the support it provides for collaboration. Ongoing and future research for the project are also described, to examine how the architecture is being expanded to increase support for additional modes of collaboration.

Open hypermedia systems hold significant potential to facilitate the development of collaborative design applications. In particular, it is the flexible approach utilized by these systems to provide infrastructure services, their ability to accommodate alternative hypermedia domains, and their facilities for information integration across application boundaries that give open hypermedia systems this potential. Current open hypermedia systems, however, have not realized their full potential to support collaborative design. They lack capabilities in one or more of these important areas. Improvements are especially needed in the collaborative infrastructure services provided by open hypermedia systems and in their support for alternative hypermedia domains. A prototype open hypermedia system is currently being extended to address these shortcomings of existing systems.

The areas of application of hypermedia technology, combined with the capabilities that hypermedia provides for manipulating structure, create an environment in which version control is very important. A hypermedia version control framework has been designed to specifically address the version control problem in open hypermedia environments. One of the primary distinctions of the framework is the partitioning of hypermedia version control functionality into intrinsic and application-specific categories. The version control has been used as a model for the design of version control services for a hyperbase management system that provides complete version support for both data and structural entities. In addition to serving as a version control model for open hypermedia environments, the framework offers a clarifying and unifying context in which to examine the issues of version control in hypermedia.

This video demonstrates different aspects of the DOLPHIN cooperative hypermedia environment in the context of electroic meeting rooms. There are three parts. First, the basic funtionality of DOLPHIN for electronic whiteboards is demonstrated. This includes the pen-based user-interface for creating informal structures such as scribbling, freehand sketching, and the creation of nodes and links. Interaction for frequently used operations is based on gesture-recognition. Second, it shows how DOLPHIN supports different aspects of meetings including the processes in the pre-, in-, and post-meeting phases. During the meeting, participants can use computers mounted in the meeting room table. Thus, everybody can access and modify information on the public space displayed on the whiteboard while sitting at the table. They can also engage in parallel private work which can be shared with the group later on. The third part demonstrates how DOLPHIN can be used to support meetings between two groups on physically distributed meeting rooms. Shared workspaces are complemented by audio/video connections between the rooms. It is noted that DOLPHIN can also be used in distributed desktop-based situations.

Many important issues in the design and implementation of hypermedia system functionality focus on the way interobject connections are represented, manipulated, and stored. A prototypic system called HB1 is being designed to meet the storage needs of next-generation hypermedia system architectures. HB1 is referred to as a hyperbase management system (HBMS) because it supports, not only the storage and manipulation of information, but the storage and manipulation of the connectivity data that link information together to form hypermedia. Among HB1's distinctions is its use of a semantic network database system to manage physical storage. Here, basic semantic modeling concepts as they apply to hypermedia systems are reviewed, and experiences using a semantic database system in HB1 are discussed. Semantic data models attempt to provide more powerful mechanisms for structuring objects than are provided by traditional approaches. In HB1, it was necessary to abstract interobject connectivity, behaviors, and information for hypermedia. Building on top of a semantic database system facilitated such a separation and made the structural aspects of hypermedia conveniently accessible to manipulation. This becomes particularly important in the implementation of structure-related operations such as structural queries. Our experience suggests that an integrated semantic object-oriented database paradigm appears to be superior to purely relational, semantic, or object-oriented methodologies for representing the structurally complex interrelationships that arise in hypermedia.