Reinforcement Learning and
Artificial
Intelligence (RLAI)
The
idea of open web pages
An open web page is a web
page that can be authored by many people, in a variety of ways, without
constraints on its appearance or interconnection with other
pages. The
RLAI group at the University of Alberta has created an open page server---hardware and
software that supports open page presentation and authoring.
Warning: the open pages system is no longer being maintained. The ambition
of open web pages is be a step toward realizing the long-standing
vision of using the internet to nurture and sustain
collaborative authoring, of communities of people exchanging and
jointly developing ideas. The current of open web page
infrastructure was designed to facilitate
collaboration among a group of artificial intelligence
researchers working at different geographic locations. Open web
pages combine,
perhaps for the first time, four key features:
The metaphor of editing the web.
Rather than editing files and transferring them to the web, web pages
are directly edited, in place. Browsing the web, if you come
to a page that needs editing, you just edit it right then and
there, immediately writing it back to wherever it came from.
There is no need to think of files and directories.
Instead of files there are web pages; instead of file directories there
are pages with links; instead of a file system there is the
internet. File names are replaced by URLs and the "find file by
content" function is replaced by google. You think directly in terms of
editing the web rather than of editing the files that
generate the web.
Collaborative authoring.
Open web pages can be changed by multiple people, often by anyone with
a web
browser (or access can be controlled by password). Despite the
potential for abuse, this works surprisingly well, as has been found
with wikis. Like
wikis, open web pages have versioning and archiving, enabling one to
edit
freely. Open pages differ from wikis primarily in having the next two
features below.
Openness to multiple ways of
authoring. Open pages can be edited using a range of software
tools,
including text entry from a browser, convenient WYSIWYG authoring in
Mozilla, and support for whatever other tools an author may prefer or
be more familiar with.
Unconstrained appearance and
interconnection pattern.
This is really an anti-feature in the sense that ordinary internet
pages are unconstrained, but many systems with features 1 and 2
introduce constraints on appearance and interconnection pattern.
For
example,
wikis are typically site based and encourage a uniform look and feel
within the site. This has advantages, but constrains page
content. Similarly, a site-based pattern of interconnecting the
pages is encouraged in wikis. It is always clear which pages are
in the
wiki and which are outside it. In contrast, open web pages are
explicitly pages interconnected arbitrarily (not sites),
and are almost
unconstrained in their appearance. Open pages are very slightly
constrained in their appearance in that they have two lines of links
across
the bottom, are
restricted to plain html (and images), and in that there are explicitly
recommended
ways
to structure them to facilitate productive collaboration.
Open web pages can be thought of as a simpler, less constrained wiki,
retaining more of the freedom and diversity of the unconstrained
internet. Another way of thinking about the differences is that
open pages are
more accommodating of authors.
In open pages authors are given their choice of tools and near complete
control of the appearance of their pages.
