Collaborative Information Retrieval: Gopher from MOO

There are two visions of how use of the global network will evolve in the future. First, individuals will use the network as a resource, providing access to material from libraries and other suppliers of information and entertainment. Second, in addition to communicating with these data sources, people will communicate with each other, using a variety of interactive text, audio, and video conferencing methods.

This paper is about a system that combines the two uses: adding an information retrieval tool (Gopher) to a `text based virtual reality' environment (MOO). The combination allows informal collaboration using information retrieval to happen across the network.

Introduction

Although these visions have usually been pursued separately, it is likely that applications will evolve that combine elements of both. The introduction of an information retrieval tool (Gopher) into a social network environment (MOO) allows exploration of some of the forms such a combination might take.

Electronic Libraries

A typical description of the electronic library is that users will have access to the contents of a local library from home or work; larger sources, right up to the Library of Congress, could be consulted as needed. The primary technology elements proposed for funding in the development of electronic libraries are in the areas of input (scanning, character recognition), retrieval, and presentation. The entire technology emphasis is on collecting material and making it available to individuals.\cite{cff}\cite{nb}

However, a library is more than just a pile of books. Libraries are also social spaces. Treating the `electronic library of the future' as an information repository ignores many of the roles played by current institutions, where library users interact with their friends, colleagues, and professionals to finding material that is relevant for them.

In the distributed world of Internet information resources, where users at home or work interact with online library resources, where are the librarians? How can those who know lead those who do not? Only the most aggressive information seekers spend time scouring the Internet for interesting information. People most frequently rely on the most useful form of information retrieval: ask someone who knows.

Of course, some interactions of this type can be mediated by electronic mail and newsgroups. However, these asynchronous methods are not interactive: there's little opportunity to watch others interact with the system, to say, politely, that you don't understand, or to engage in the other kinds of behavior that go along with interactive learning.

The current mechanisms for distributed information in the Internet-- World-Wide Web, WAIS, Gopher --do not directly provide any mechanisms for collaboration. The system described in this paper, MOO-Gopher, shows how an information retrieval system designed for solitary users can become a part of a social and collaborative environment.

Computer-based conferencing

MOO, the conferencing system for which we developed MOO-Gopher, is a MUD; that is, it's

a software program that accepts `connections' from multiple users across some kind of network (e.g., telephone lines or the Internet) and provides to each user access to a shared database of `rooms', `exits', and other objects. Each user browses and manipulates this database from `inside' one of those rooms, seeing only those objects that are in the same room and moving from room to room mostly via the exits that connect them. A MUD, therefore, is a kind of virtual reality, an electronically-represented `place' that users can visit. [curtis]

MUDs were originally developed as games; they grew out of attempts to build multi-player versions of text-based environments such as Dungeon, Adventure and Zork. (This part of their heritage is evident in the name--``MUD'' was originally derived from ``Multi-User Dungeon'', although other ``D'' words have been suggested as replacements.) They are considered by some to be frivolous use of computer systems--some universities have taken to prohibiting use of MUDs as a recreational activity that wastes system resources. However, the idea behind MUD--multi-user interaction in a simulated setting--is a powerful one with many applications.

A session with a MUD might begin like this (taken from JaysHouse, the MOO where MOO-Gopher was implemented):

% telnet jayshouse.ccs.neu.edu 1709
Welcome to JaysHouse!

Type:
 `connect  '
            to connect to your character
 `connect Guest'
            to connect to a guest character
 `@who'     to see who's logged in right now

After you've logged in type:
 `help'     for documentation.

>connect guest

Underground
This is a dark, cramped space. It appears to be very crowded in here; you keep
    bumping into what feels like drainage pipes, alligators, and other people
    (apparently sleeping). One useful thing that you've discovered in your
    bumbling about is a manhole cover above you.
Don't forget to take a look at the newspaper. Type `news' to see it.
 
>up

Hwy. 169
A swath of blacktop scything through the forest to the west and farmland to
    the east. Trucks rumble past, accelerated to dangerous speeds by
    wild-eyed drivers on dangerous amphetamines; cars scream past as well,
    most piloted by alcohol-mad college students driven over the edge by
    one too many calculus midterms. This is a dangerous place to be. A
    small driveway dips into the woods to the west here, and you notice
    (strangely enough) a manhole cover in the middle of the highway.

MOO, like all MUDs, is also a social environment. MUDs allow individuals to converse with each other. All the participants in the same `room' hear what others in the room say. It is possible to `whisper' to another user privately, or speak aloud. Coordination of communication happens using familiar metaphors; to talk to specific people, you go to the room where those people are.

In addition to conversational interactions in MOO, it is common for MOO users to construct things for use by others: a cuisinart in the kitchen, an operational game (Scrabble, MOOnopoly), a refrigerator for leaving notes for your friends. It is common for MOO programmers to extend the environment in personal, interesting, and unexpected ways.

Gopher in MOO

The initial motivation behind MOO-Gopher was to provide access, from MOO, to real world data outside the MOO environment. This would allow `virtual reality' objects to interact with data that exists outside of the mud world, but under the programmable control of the inhabitants of the MOO world.

A sample `session' in MOO-Gopher illustrates the nature of the interaction. In this transcript, you've just made your way to the library at JaysHouse.

Library
A small library. It is lit by several small lamps.  A big oak bookcase stands against a
 wall.
You see the slate dispenser, a Roget's Thesaurus, a treatise on why MOOs are not a
 waste, a note about MOO-client protocol, a dictionary, a Sample Help Text, a note
 called 'help movement', and the Gopher Slate here.

Larry arrives.
Larry says, "Hello"

>"hello

You say "hello"

Jay arrives.
Larry says, "welcome"

>look at gopher slate

Gopher Slate
1. The U of I Weather Machine (menu)
2. Electronic Frontier Foundation archives(menu)
3. parcftp MOO anonymous FTP information(menu)
4. Gopher sites for biology (menu)
5. Movie reviews (menu)
6. Mankato State University (menu)
7. MSEN inc (menu)

>"I came to try out gopher

You say, "I came to try out gopher"
Larry says, "What did you want to look for?"

>"A favorite gopher for biologists is at ftp.bio.indiana.edu

You say, "A favorite gopher for biologists is at ftp.bio.indiana.edu"
Larry jumps to ftp.bio.indiana.edu socket 70 on Gopher Slate.

>look at slate

Gopher Slate: ftp.bio.indiana.edu 
1. About-IUBio-Archive  [ 7Dec92, 24kb]
2. About-New-Features (menu)
3. Flybase (menu)
4. Genbank-Sequences (menu)
5. IUBio-Software+Data (menu)
6. Molecular-Biology (menu)
7. Network-News (menu)
8. Other-Bio-Gophers-Etc (menu)
9. Other-Gophers-Etc (menu)
10. Species (menu)
11. This-Gopher (menu)
12. Tunnel to Gopher+ door of IUBio (menu)

Larry says, "everytime someone moves the gopher pointer, the slate's description
 changes"
Larry goes back up a level on Gopher Slate.
Larry picks '2. Electronic Frontier Foundation archives (menu)' on Gopher Slate.
Larry says, "so now, look at the slate again"

>look at slate

Gopher Slate: gopher.eff.org Electronic Frontier Foundation archives
1. About the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Gopher Service
2. About the Electronic Frontier Foundation
3. Electronic Frontier Foundation Files & Information (menu)
4. Computers & Academic Freedom mailing list archives & info (menu)
5. EFF-Austin Gopher Service (menu)
6. Other Gopher and Information Servers (menu)
Larry says, "if you want to choose an item, just say 'pick  on slate'"

>pick 2 on slate

You pick '2. About the Electronic Frontier Foundation' on Gopher Slate.
******************************************* 
General Information about the Electronic Frontier Foundation
******************************************* 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) was founded in July, 1990, to assure freedom of
 expression in digital media, with a particular emphasis on applying the
 principles embodied in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to computer-based
 communication.
-1 of 24-- 'next on Gopher Slate' for more -

>"I did it ahah

You say, "I did it ahah"
Larry claps

Second, the fact that MOO provides easy interaction between people, and that MOO information tools, programmed in MOO code, can be easily manipulated from within an interactive session, means bugs can be fixed and new features and tools added very quickly. It is usually difficult for the implementor of a software tool to observe, first hand, how the tool is being used. In MOO, this kind of interaction is frequent: by observing the errors and misunderstandings of novice users, the implementor can see the ways in which a user interface is confusing or awkward. It's often hard for an ordinary user of a piece of software to provide adequate information for the programmer to locate a bug. But in MOO sessions, the users can talk about problems, the developers can work with them, possibly adding debugging information to the code as it's being used, to figure out what exactly is going on. And often the problems can be located and fixed on the fly, in a matter of a few minutes.

Why Gopher?

Retrieving a piece of information with Gopher requires a stateless transaction: the client opens a telnet connection to a given socket at the server, send a selector string, and collects the response: one connection, one (single-line) command, one (arbitrary-length) response. All Gopher interactions are based on this simple mechanism, whether doing a search, fetching text or an image, or getting back a directory in a hierarchy.

MOO implementation of Gopher

Getting at the data

In order to improve efficiency, the Gopher implementation does caching--it keeps track of recent requests, and the time they occurred, and just returns the `old' data if it isn't too old. The cache is global.

This provides only a programmatic interface to Gopher--that is, it provides data in a form that can be passed around by MOO programs, but can't be easily used (or even seen) by ordinary users. In order to be useful, MOO-Gopher needed user interface objects--objects which provide the user with a view on some part of Gopher space. These have evolved over time, from our initial experiments with ``Gopher rooms'' to our current ``Gopher slates'' and other objects.

Gopher rooms

The Gopher Room worked very much like a traditional Gopher client in its command structure. As with most MOO things, state is permanent: if you leave the MOO and come back another day, the room will be in the same state you left it, unless someone else came in and changed it.

The Gopher room keeps track of a `stack' of visited nodes. When you `pick' a menu choice (or `jump' to an unrelated Gopher node), the Gopher room's state changes to point at the new menu, but the old menu is kept on the stack. You can then `pop' the stack to go back to where you picked from. Picking a text node was different--it would show the text to you (and no one else), but not change the state of the room.

In the initial design, everyone in the room saw all changes to the room, but there were some complaints--people didn't want to see the various state changes if they weren't interested, but did want to talk to those who did the retrievals. Also, anyone in the room could change the state at any time. This became a problem if two people were trying to work together--they could accidentally stumble over each other's commands. A simple interlock was added: you couldn't `pick' a line unless you had seen the current menu.

Gopher notes

Gopher lists

Gopher slates

This led to the development of a `Gopher slate'. We wanted something that was portable, like the notes, but also allowed the user to move through Gopher space, like the rooms. The initial idea was a sort of chalkboard that you could carry around and show to people. What we ended up with was a laptop computer, since it's rare that you point at something on a chalkboard and the whole chalkboard erases itself and replaces the text with some different piece of text. The laptop was a straightforward translation of Gopher into MOO terms: You use a computer which has a Gopher client (not in so many words), and manipulate it in various ways. This wasn't as intuitive as the Gopher notes, again, but it carried out the function that the Gopher rooms had handled, while also being portable.

One problem with moving from rooms to slates was a loss of convenience. With many Gopher clients, you can get around by simple one-keystroke or point-and-click commands. Given the MOO environment, we couldn't easily do that. (The shortest commands possible are two keystrokes--one letter and the enter key.) In the Gopher rooms, though, we could still use fairly short commands, one or two words like ``pop'' or ``pick 7''. Once we went to the ``slates'' metaphor, because of the way the usual MOO parser works, we had to use commands like ``pick 7 on slate'', always specifying the object we wanted to work with. If there was more than one slate in the room, we would have to specify further: ``pick 7 on jonny's slate''. After a while we worked out a system where you could ``work with Jonny's slate'' and then the slate commands would be abbreviated to the form they had in rooms--``pick 7'', and so on. The long forms were still available if you wanted to do something quickly with a slate without formally starting to work with it.

Gopher notebooks

We hope that the notebooks will bridge the gap between the flexibility of the room and slate, and the familiarity of the Gopher note. It remains to be seen whether we can make the ``page size'' representation clear enough to make this familiarity work out.

Other objects

Text forwarding: linking MOO, Gopher, and electronic mail

Several users of the early MOO-Gopher objects said that they would like to have the things they found emailed to them. This would allow them to keep the texts around in a more permanent form; to more easily cut and paste, for example to quote in another text; and, of course, to use their regular tools just to read the text. We implemented this through a ``mailme'' command; users could ask the MOO to mail them notes, or selections from slates or rooms.

This text-forwarding facility comes in handy frequently; for example, when one of us was looking for the registration form for the Gopher '93 conference, and happened to be logged on to the MOO, he used MOO-Gopher to find the form, and had the MOO mail it to him, so he could print it out and send it in.

Text-forwarding is also useful for items that aren't meant to be read as flat ASCII. MOO currently can't deal with binary Gopher items; however, there are a number of formats that are composed of printable ASCII characters but aren't especially readable in that primitive form. TeX and Postscript are two examples. When a user finds a document in one of these formats, the simplest way to read it is to have it mailed, and then read it with a TeX or Postscript viewer locally.

When the Gopher object is pointed towards a directory, rather than a piece of text, the mailed form is somewhat different. A directory is mailed as a sequence of Gopher nodes, in the standard ``Gopher bookmark'' format--these can then be edited into a file, and some clients will understand these as a list of interesting Gopher items. This allows us to bridge a gap between MOO-Gopher and local Gopher clients.

A less clumsy way to bridge that gap is to use specialized clients. We worked out a protocol in which the MOO sends a string to the client, and the client invokes a local Gopher client to bring up the indicated item.

Users and communities

Although Gopher was the initial attraction for the biologists, it isn't central to their plans for the conference center; the nature of MOO in general lends itself to the ``virtual conference'' idea, by being interactive and providing a somewhat familiar environment--rooms, people, tables and so on, as opposed to the more abstract forms of, say, Usenet, email, and IRC. However, Gopher provides them with some useful tools.

At a conference, it's possible for a speaker to show slides, or overhead projections. In the context of a MOO conference, this would take the form of information available via Gopher. The speaker would prepare ahead of time by making a ``slide'' that points to a given item in Gopher space; then, during the presentation, the act of ``showing the slide'' would cause a message to be printed to the audience's client programs, indicating that this item should be retrieved and displayed. Fortunately, many biological resources are already available via Gopher; so there's some degree of Gopher sophistication in the community.

In less formal settings, people use MOO-Gopher, not for showing prepared ``slides'', but for collaborative exploration of Gopher space, usually with the intent of solving a problem or finding the answer to a question. Many of our users have Gopher clients locally; so why do they use MOO-Gopher instead? Mostly because MOO offers a collaborative medium for information retrieval, as opposed to the isolated feel of other Gopher clients. For example, recently a team of six MOOers at JaysHouse entered the Internet Scavenger Hunt. The Internet Scavenger Hunt is a monthly contest to find information that is publically available over the network. The team worked together, on MOO, to collaborate on finding the answers to the questions posed. They used Gopher slates extensively (although not exclusively) as a way to help each other.

People involved in that experience found that:

• MOO makes it easier to brainstorm about how to find a desired piece of information. The scavengers could pick up on each other's ideas and take them in different directions, as opposed to just searching independently.
• MOO, by being a semi-realistic environment, made it easier to communicate results to one another. It feels more comfortable to ``show a note'' to someone than to supply a Gopher address.

Related Work

Conclusions

Information retrieval without collaboration lacks an important element of how people interact with information. MOO-Gopher is an effective means of bringing information retrieval into a collaborative environment. Friends and colleagues use MOO-Gopher together, brainstorming ways to find needed resources.

In the online setting, information access tends to be far less formal than what happens in a physical library. Online information is used for gathering small bits of information (a word in a dictionary or encyclopedia, an article in a database), while library use tends to be structured more around formal research.

There is much more peer collaboration in online information access than there is in a physical library; those who maintain their site's information repositories fill the role of librarians, but currently do not interact as strongly with the user community.

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

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Author Information

Epilogue

You join Michele.
Michele says, "Hi!"
>:waves
Grump waves
JoeFeedback tried to just stay in one place.
>:made a shortened transcript, but it is too long still
Grump made a shortened transcript, but it is too long still
JoeFeedback is too!
JoeFeedback says, "Maybe not."
JoeFeedback says, "Send it to me."
Michele says, "Transcript?  Oh, right."
>:added an introduction
Grump added an introduction
>"at least, Mickey thought we should talk more about the second thing
You say, "at least, Mickey thought we should talk more about the second thing"
JoeFeedback says, "exporting?"
JoeFeedback hsm
JoeFeedback nods.
JoeFeedback says, "It's too bad we don't have more to say about it."
>"oh, we can make stuff up
Michele rereads 'combining bringing'
You say, "oh, we can make stuff up"
JoeFeedback says, "Actually, we have some stuff, but it's not clear in the
 beginning that we're going to talk about it."
JoeFeedback says, "Oh good."
>:changes combining bringing
Grump changes combining bringing
>:wonders if we should include a transcript of talking about the paper
Grump wonders if we should include a transcript of talking about the paper
>:grins
Grump grins
JoeFeedback thought that was a significant part of Mickey's comments--that
 we should say in the beginning why people should be interested.
JoeFeedback picks up bonker.
>"I tell people I'm working on a paper with someone that I've never met who
 goes by 'Joe Feedback' and they don't believe me.
JoeFeedback bonks Grump with bonker.... Grump says "Oif"
You say, "I tell people I'm working on a paper with someone that I've never
 met who goes by 'Joe Feedback' and they don't believe me."
Michele grins.
JoeFeedback laughs.