Story Fountain: Intelligent Support for Story Research and Exploration Paul Mulholland, Trevor Collins & Zdenek Zdrahal Knowledge Media Institute The Open University, UK +44 1908 {654506, 655731, 654512} {p.mulholland, t.d.collins, z.zdrahal}@open.ac.uk ABSTRACT Increasingly heritage institutions are making digital artifacts available to the general public and research groups to promote the active exploration of heritage and encourage visits to heritage sites. Stories, such as folklore and first person accounts form a useful and engaging heritage resource for this purpose. Story Fountain provides intelligent support for the exploration of digital stories. The suite of functions provided in Story Fountain together support the investigation of questions and topics that require the accumulation, association or induction of information across the story archive. Story Fountain provides specific support toward this end such as for comparing and contrasting story concepts, the presentation of story paths between concepts, and mapping stories and events according to properties such as who met whom and who lived where. Categories & Subject Descriptors: H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces — Evaluation/methodology, User-centered design; H.5.4 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Hypertext/Hypermedia — Navigation; General Terms: Design, Human Factors, Theory. Keywords: Web-based interfaces, Personalization and customization of interfaces, Ubiquitous interfaces and smart environments, Ontologies, Intelligent exploration. INTRODUCTION A prevailing aim of many heritage institutions is to allow the public to actively engage with the subject matter, answering their own questions and making their own interpretations. This draws on the long-standing mission of many heritage institutions to provide a source of education [16] and reflects contemporary approaches to learning such as constructivism that stress the importance of the active learner [9]. Many heritage institutions are investigating how new technology can help them to realize these goals. The work described in this paper was conducted as part of the European Union funded CIPHER project, a 30 month research project that began in 2002 with the aim of supporting communities of interest in the active exploration of heritage resources, by means of story sharing [13]. Within the CIPHER project we are developing and testing easy-to-use tools for the exploration and description of digital heritage and the construction, presentation and sharing of stories in communities of interest associated with a heritage institution. Here we wish to focus on the support provided in the project for the exploration of a corpus of digital stories. In designing support for exploration we made two assumptions. First, we characterize exploration as question driven rather than unguided. By this we mean that the person exploring the resources is generally not randomly finding and using the resources but is trying to answer one or more questions and formulate further questions for investigation. Second, we assume that the questions being explored are open-ended and evaluative rather than satisfiable solely by factual information. To support this kind of exploration we need to provide functionality for different ways of organizing and traversing the story archive that can be matched to the task and characteristics of the user. This is beyond what can directly be supported by a search engine, which primarily supports information location within pages rather than reasoning across pages. Our work has been motivated by needs identified while working with Bletchley Park, the wartime code breaking center and home of Colossus, the world’s first programmable computer. The code breaking center closed in 1945 and did not become a heritage institution until the early 1990’s after decades of secrecy. Since then a group of volunteers associated to the Park have been piecing together much of its hidden history. One important source of information has been interviews conducted with those that worked there and their families. Approximately 100 interviews have been collected. Other sources of Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. IUI’04, January 13–16, 2004, Madeira, Funchal, Portugal. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-815-6/04/0001…$5.00. 62