Realizing a Virtual Working Environment Surrounded by a Personal Digital Library for Assisting the Worker's Creative Activity

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This research aims to realize a computerized virtual working environment by employing the techniques related to a digital library. A working environment here consists of layered work-subspaces surrounded by a digital library, where each work-subspace collects multiple windows for a specified task. The workers become able to find the ideas for the creative activity while he/she proceeds with the daily tasks under this environment. To realize such an environment we construct a digital library storing various kinds of application data (including documents), and create a workspace in which each subspace is placed in some specified layer.A digital library here can work as a common-work-subspace. We can effectively browse in it followed by the suggestion "this data will be relevant," derived automatically by considering the keywords and the path-name of each data, the tree-structured data arrangement, and the worker's feed back relevance judgment. The workspace is a virtual 3-dimensional space expanded by utilizing multi-displays and by arranging subspaces in a layered fashion. To assist the creative activity the various kinds of information spread in different work-subspaces is to be manipulated simultaneously. This is done by rotating the entire work-subspace so as to look into the desired work-subspaces.We experimentally compared the realized environment with the widely utilized multi-window and/or virtual desktop ones to see how effectively the subjects can perform the tasks. Though we did not certify whether or not the subjects could raise up the creativity, they performed the given tasks fairly effectively in the environment here.