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InBCT 2.1 Plan for 2004
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In 2004, we plan to go further on the most important accomplishments
of the year 2003, which included

- FenPDF is in actual real-life use by our research group for managing
  the academic literature related to our research. 

- We have developed the LEGO + optomechanical mouse custom controllers paradigm
  for easy and cheap construction of custom computer controllers

- We have developed functional programming -related methods to speed up
  view generation: if a certain part of a view only used RDF nodes that have
  not changed between frames, that part can be reused automatically
  since the functional programming paradigm gives guarantees about
  the result not depending on anything else.

- We have developed methods for enhancing the readability of freely 
  rotatable/scalable/deformable text rendered using graphics accelerators

- The first Storm blocks have gone through a P2P network between machines

- The completion of Navidoc, a UML - Javadoc documentation unification tool for HTML.

- We have developed the Fenfire Loom, a focus+context RDF browser

- The first published article about unique background textures

    - unique background textures are in use in FenPDF and have shown themselves
      to be *extremely* useful there, demonstrating that we were asking
      the right questions very far away from the mainstream.



In 2004, we plan to (more information about any of these topics
can be requested by emailing Tuomas Lukka)

- Make our work accessible for the financiers by 

    - documenting our architectures and code in detail, to make
      it easier for people from outside our project to "get into" the code
      (Navidoc is essential for this)

    - creating internal technical reports about subjects that the financiers
      express specific interest in

    - publishing scientific articles about several parts of our work that have 
      matured enough, for example:

	- FenPDF, the literature comprehension tool, the first real user-level
	  product of this project

	- Alph, the xanalogical referential fluid media implementation which
	  includes important innovations related to realistic implementations
	  of RFM 

	- Libvob, the UI development system we use

	- The Functional programming view approach

	- Irregular viewport edges

- Start testing shrinking of the FenPDF user interface to mobile-sized screens
  (specifically requested by Nokia in beginning of 2003, causing us
  to create the framework for custom controllers)

- Further develop FenPDF-like interfaces to be applicable to e.g. photographs, 
  sounds, SMS messages (another request from Nokia).

- Develop Loom to combine with FenPDF and other applitudes to get the full
  hyperstructure functionality

- Develop UI mapping techniques: now that we have a *real* FenPDF bidirectionally
  linked structure, there are several ideas in user interfaces that we can test,
  such as creating a multi-focus view which shows the routes between the foci
  in the graph. This is one of the core areas of new innovations that our
  approach enables, since we're doing things differently from the mainstream:
  on a Web/Filesystem -based system, such views would not make nearly as
  much sense.

- Research the uniqueness of the unique background textures further.
  The first article used a rather ad hoc distribution for the textures,
  we have ideas about how to make the uniqueness more well-founded by using
  user experiments.

- Develop libvob vobscene recursion, enabling even more interesting functional
  programming -related techniques in views. This technique is useful
  for retaining fast interactions even with complex views without
  too much resource consumption.

- Storm-based transparent collaboration: two people meeting in a coffee shop
  and working together on the same document, both with their own computers,
  transparently synchronizing through a *local* network, with no servers
  involved, later synching the results to the whole working group.
  Requires:

    - Further development of Storm

    - RDF vocabulary-based modular change merging

    - UI techniques for understanding changes to documents in FenPDF