D3E - Digital Document Discourse Environment fact-file

What's the Problem?

• Knowledge-intensive work in organisations is document-centric. Consequently, the process of circulating documents for discussion is ubiquitous and requires flexible, lightweight technical support.
• This is an instance of the broader requirement in collaborative knowledge work for tools to recognise the importance of multiple perspectives, and the critiquing and debating of ideas.

Towards a Solution

D³E is a tool for document-centric discussion. The document could be anything, from a policy proposal, to technical paper or multimedia learning resource. D³E makes it easy to transform an HTML file into an interactive document, tightly integrated with topic-specific or section-specific discussion threads. The file can be your own, or any website.

The fastest, most 'lightweight' version is Ubiquitous-D³E which enables you to discuss any website. On a web form (see below), you enter the target website URL of interest, and specify any discussion topics you want to focus people on. This then generates your site for you (for examples see the guided tour below, or read about it on the D³E website)

Hit the button, and it generates a frames interface with the target website on the left, and the structured discussion space on the right, ready to go, bound together at a single URL:

More advanced publishing options are provided in the D³E Publisher's Toolkit. This is a small Java application providing a menu/forms tool to set up publication styles and documents.

In contrast to Ubiquitous-D³E which does not modify the target document in any way (since it could be any website, using any web media), the toolkit is specifically for your own structured documents. From an input HTML file with headings, the toolkit generates a frames-based environment with automatic hyperlinking for navigating around sections, checking citations and footnotes, and tight integration with a discussion space for critiquing documents. There is no known limit to document size (in fact its navigational support is particularly useful for large documents). See this example for the key elements of the document interface which is generated.

Take a Guided Tour

Introduction to D³E (Macromedia Flash Movie)

Ubiquitous D³E: publishing any website/webmedia (Macromedia Flash Movie)

D³E Publisher's Toolkit: enhanced document markup and user interface

D³Eprints: Integrating D³E with a document repository (Macromedia Flash Movie)

D³E application: Electronic journals with commentary space (Macromedia Flash Movie)

D³E application: Publishing an ontology for feedback (Macromedia Flash Movie)

D³E application: Dearing Report on Higher Education in the UK (Macromedia Flash Movie)

Try a Demonstration

D³E builds 100% on open source technologies, and is distributed as such: download client/server applications and code.

Technical requirements: Windows to run Java desktop publisher's toolkit. Any server platform running Apache, PHP and MySQL to run the discussion server.

Example Applications

(See also the guided tours)

AKT Reference Ontology discussion: bug and feature commenting (AKT Consortium)
Participatory systems development: programmers and end-users communicating (UCAR Unidata, Colorado)

D³Eprints augmented AKT digital library: every document has a public and any number of private discussion spaces (AKT Consortium)

A best practices intranet journal within a large petrochemical company, enabling staff to support and challenge proposed best pracices, relating the ideas to different contexts around the world (based on the successful e-journal model pioneered by JIME).

Further Reading

Key document: Buckingham Shum, S. and Sumner, T. (2001), JIME: An Interactive Journal for Interactive Media. First Monday, 6, (2), February, 2001. Republished: Learned Publishing (2001), 14, 273–285.

Other relevant documents: Sumner, T. and Buckingham Shum, S. (1998), From Documents to Discourse: Shifting Conceptions of Scholarly Publishing. Proceedings of CHI’98: Human Factors in Computing Systems (Los Angeles, 18-23 April, 1998). ACM Press: New York.

Semantic representation

View in the AKT Triplestore Browser or as RDF.

Also available in DOAP RDF (Description Of A Project)