PLACELESS DOCUMENTS Placeless Documents are documents that are organized and managed according to their properties, rather than according to their location. Document properties can be things you already know about your documents, like that they're published, or notes, or about the budget,or drafts, or source code, or important, or shared with your colleagues, or from your manager, or big, or from the Web, or... whatever suits you. Document properties can also be things that you want to be true about your documents, like that they are backed up, or replicated on your laptop, or can be purchased for a small fee. These latter properties carry the code to implement or interface with the desired functionality.  Document properties are statements about your documents that make sense to you, and affect what you're going to do with the documents.

What does it mean?

We live and work in an information-filled world. The project focuses on helping people cope with the large and diverse information spaces that are part of life in the networked world. Our approach is to provide information consumers with a unifying model for organizing and manipulating their information.

Much of the information that we commonly use is in the form of documents, both physical and electronic. In fact, the use of electronic documents on our computer desktops is pervasive, and even though they unify much of desktop computing, the document metaphor falls short of providing an accessible and readily understood way to interact with all forms of information, whether electronic or physical. Instead, we resort to specialized applications for much of our computer-based work. Electronic documents are managed through different systems like mail, WWW, and file systems. Similarly, the many devices we use in the course of our work (including fax machines, scanners, televisions, VCRs, telephones) manipulate and store information, yet they do not integrate seamlessly with the rest of our on-line information.

Furthermore, the means available for individuals or groups to organize and customize their information spaces are extremely poor and driven mostly by storage and distribution models, not user needs. The most common model for information organization is hierarchical. The use of folders as a fundamental organizing principle, and the restriction that documents (mail messages, files, URLs, etc.) appear in only one folder at a time, force users to create strict categorizations, resulting in inflexible organizations that tend to persist over time even though their needs evolve. Similarly, customization of the organization and the behavior of information according to individual requirements is cumbersome, if not impossible. Access to a shared document that one individual deems as corresponding to the budget and another project cannot be easily tailored for both specialized functional requirements are equally hard to achieve. If a user can express that a document is read-only, and that it is a Word document, why cant heexpress that updated copies should be faxed to a colleague once a week?

This project is about removing these hurdles by using a novel infrastructure and proving its benefits through applications that exploit its capabilities. We plan not only to change the way people interact with their currently segregated world of documents, but we plan to exploit a single concept the document and its properties to allow users to interact with arbitrary information.

Our vision is one of customizable, context-aware management of integrated information spaces, which:

In this world the focus is on information, customization, and functionality that extends beyond the abilities of monolithic applications. Essentially, information carries the behaviors and semantics needed to operate on it. Information is independent of location and becomes responsive to the environments it is used in and the contexts of individual users, and it is managed independently by both its consumers and providers.

Most work on Placeless Documents as a project wrapped up at the end of 1999. Related work continued for awhile in the Harland Project

For more information, send email to jthornton@parc.com