The Carquinez Bridge Replacement Project is a civil engineering
initiative within the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), charged
with the design of a replacement bridge over the Carquinez Straits at the north end
of the San Francisco Bay. For the past two years I and my colleagues in the Work
Practice & Technology area at Xerox PARC have been engaged in a collaborative
research effort with engineers in the Carquinez Project group, focussed on a collection
of documents called the engineering project files. Together we're exploring what
it would mean to create an electronic version of the files, currently maintained
on paper in three ring binders.
The project files are an instance of what we've termed working document collections,
occupying a niche between the active documents on one's desktop and those stored
in an archive. Project files are maintained by every project team at Caltrans,
and comprise a kind of cumulative
documentary record of a given engineering project. The documents in the files are
extremely heterogeneous, ranging from standard business correspondence to quite specialized
charts, maps and other exhibits tied to the particular requirements of civil engineering.
Documents are filed
according to the Caltrans Uniform Filing System, a hierarchically arranged set of
categories designed roughly to map the chronological course of a project. Our intervention
is aimed at defining the work practice and technology requirements for migrating
the project files from paper to digital media, integrated with Caltrans' developing
intranet. Our approach is to require minimal overhead for putting documents into
the collection, while providing opportunities for arbitrarily extensible, iterative,
and modifiable document coding, and multiple strategies for document retrieval.
Host: Leysia Palen
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http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~laurav/colloquia/index.html