[My first foray, c. 1997, into thinking about the process of software. –Bill, 10/25/2010] Infrastructure Analysis and Specification Design Coding Debugging Time and Space Costs References Infrastructure Error Tracking Maintain a personal error log. I do it in HTML with this template: <hr> <b>Date: </b> date <br><b>Symptom: </b> the-symptom <br><b>Cause: </b> the-cause <br><b>Fix: </b> the-fix […]
William C. Wake, 5-27-97 Every disaster relies on innumerable little events. Any of them could have been side-stepped, and the disaster averted. It’s a funny feeling when you look back and realize that you were responsible for one of those events. C++ is a programming language. It is unfair to call it a disaster, but […]
Chapter 3 – A View of Documents Draft part of dissertation of William C. Wake Last updated: March 26, 1996 Documents as Categories What does it mean to move this document to that format? This is the key question we’ll address through the framework of category theory. Category theory is a branch of abstract mathematics […]
William C. Wake 1-30-96NOTE: This draft does not have figures, and many formulas were ruined in the conversion. Introduction A user browsing a library’s online collection has several functions that are helpful in locating useful items: searching, sorting, and restricting sets of items. For the SortTables interface to support these functions, a key problem is […]
Context Exceptions are rare There is no language support for exceptions Forces Indications Code that looks like this: status = add_primitive (data_structure, value1); if (status != success) return status; status = add_routine (data_structure, value2); if (status != success) return status; Pattern Many times you are accumulating information into a data structure. For some errors, you […]
SortTables – CIKM ’95 William C. Wake and Edward A. Fox Nov. 30, 1995 Presentation at CIKM ’95 Overview Browsing SortTables: A System for Browsing Design Goals and Implementation Experience Data Structures Future Directions Browsing: Physical Access to the item Potential access to all the items Sense of neighborhood Zooming Serendipity Browsing: Online Like physical […]
Dissertation – Hypothesis 9-3-95 Part of the draft dissertation of William C. Wake Model Evaluation of information retrieval systems has often been treatedas “black-box” evaluation: “How well does the system match resultsto the query?” While such a question is important, it is notcomplete.As we move toward considering more of the human interface designof a system, […]
SortTables, A Browser – GraduateSeminar, 8-30-95 SortTables: A Browser for a Digital Library Bill Wake Graduate Seminar, VPI Computer Science Aug. 30, 1995 Overview Browsing SortTables: A System forBrowsing Evaluation of a Process Conclusion Browsing Physical Browsing Access to the item Potential access to all the items Sense of neighborhood Variable focus Serendipity Online Browsing […]
Dissertation – Experiment 8-21-95Part of the draft dissertation of William C. Wake User Groups Key User Groups Student Researcher Job Student Researcher Attributes: Education High school + Bachelor’s + Able to type Yes Yes Computer User Yes Yes Frequency of Use Occasional Frequent Environment Dedicated terminal at library Dedicated terminal at library, Net access via […]
SortTables – A Browser for a Digital Library William C. Wake* and Edward A. Fox*# Department of Computer Science* and Computing Center#Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State UniversityBlacksburg, VA 24061-0106{wakew, fox}@cs.vt.edu Abstract: Much research in information retrieval has focused more onmatching results to queries than on browsing those results. Afterbriefly exploring browsing in physical and electronic […]