37.3 DAGS 93 CD-ROM

The DAGS'93 conference on Parallel Computation and Parallel I/O was held in the summer of 1993 at Dartmouth College. Because of the success in developing multimedia proceedings for DAGS'92, a successor was planned based on the original. As in the earlier effort, it was chosen to provide a rich set of features to allow the readers of the electronic proceedings to manipulate them in various ways. The original plan had been to reuse the previous interface (which was Macintosh-specific) with some modifications. However, to allow for broader distribution it was decided to develop a version had would run on both Macintoshes and PC's. Although the original version was based on HyperCard (which can be ported to ToolBook on the PC), it also used many XCMDs (extensions to HyperCard). A direct port to ToolBook would have required reimplementing all of these XCMDs. Therefore, it was decided to reimplement the interface without XCMDs in HyperCard and ToolBook.

Figure IV.11 Hypertext interface of DAGS `93

Figure IV.11 displays a screen shot of the DAGS'93 hypertext interface. The GUI is much simpler, as it has to run on two platforms, and does not make use of advanced Macintosh user interface features like, e.g., floating palettes. On the other hand, the search capabilities have been greatly extended based on requests of DAGS'92 users.

Figure IV.12 DAGS'93 talks screen

Figure IV.12 shows the redefined and extended talks interface for the DAGS'93 proceedings. Because some users only want to watch and not to interact, the interface includes low-interactivity controls as well as advanced features like random talk access, where users can bring up a contents list for the talk and quickly jump to any section, or scroll through the slides using the progress bar or the arrow keys.

For users wishing to interact more closely with the proceedings, there are numerous other features available: Users are able to add marginal notes to slides. The interface also supports a variety of hypertext links, including bookmarks, user-definable links, and paths. The path implementation supports both pages in papers and slides in presentations. Paths in presentations also support the creation of new presentations, as a presentation is simply an ordering of slides. It is also possible to search the text of slides using a variety of keyword-based mechanisms, such that a user may identify slides by their content.

Unfortunately, the DAGS'93 proceedings have not been published commercially so far, as the publisher withdrew support when the project was well on its way. Nevertheless, the DAGS'93 multimedia proceedings provided a valuable testbed for testing advanced concept and to collect in-depth experience. A reduced version is currently being ported to the web to be published on the DAGS web site using the tools developed for the DAGS'95 web proceedings.