Title:
Effectively Conveying Information through Meaningful Presentations

The computer as an active information conveyor
The End of Document Engineering as we know it...

Summary (335 words, max 300)

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The Web has fundamentally changed the way we access information, both in
our private life and in our role as scientists.  While extensive
research has focussed on retrieving information on the Web,  little
has been done to structure and present search results effectively.

In traditional media, such as newspapers and scientific articles,
collecting the raw material is an initial stage of a complete
information dissemination process.  The majority of the work goes into
structuring the information, emphasizing the most important
information, making relationships to related information explicit and
presenting the results in an effective way to the reader.

While computers are used as information rendering devices, they
currently provide little intelligent support for the
highly complex task of creating meaningful presentations.  The
challenge for computer science research is thus to transform the
computer from a passive rendering device to an active participant in
the process of conveying information effectively to the end-user.

Conventional wisdom (in document engineering) assumes the independence
of content, structure and graphic design.  While this separation of
concerns has well-understood advantages from an engineering
perspective, in most practical situations content, structure and
graphic design are interdependent.  To elevate the computer to an
active participant in the resolution of these interdependencies, we
require a re-examination of the document engineering assumption.

In order to deal with these interdependencies we need to capture,
organise and analyse knowledge from appropriate professions.  This
includes techniques for creating comprehensive and meaningful
structures of information, which need to be distilled and
incorporated into a computational environment.

Our approach thus leads to two scientific challenges:

- to realise a paradigm shift where document engineering is enhanced
to the extent that it is able to steer the presentation creation
process;

- to provide a sound scientific basis to elicit knowledge from
existing communication theory.

The information revolution we are currently part of will not be
complete before we have grasped the science to make full use of the
computer's potential as a comprehensive and intelligent interface to
massive amounts of information.