Office Applications PROGRAM

Vision

XRCE's early vision of an office populated by an ecology of appliances is becoming a reality. XRCE has expanded this vision with new technology themes: mobility, the information explosion and document evolution.
The Office Applications Program ensuring a continuum of technologies flowing from XRCE's research to Xerox business groups and partners.

Mobility

The office worker has to perform more and more work offsite, and boundaries between the private and the business life tend to vanish. He will be aided for that purpose by a number of devices such as phones or PDAs. It is important to provide technologies allowing mobile workers to integrate as smoothly as possible into unfamiliar environments and discover local resources.

Information Explosion

Today's office worker is overloaded with information because of the increasing numbers of communication channels, document formats and information sources. However, it is still up to him/her to filter through this ever-increasing amount of information and turn it into knowledge. It is therefore necessary to provide tools for the personalisation of content of documents based on the user's profile and context, and document indexing, filtering and summarization techniques to help the user manage this load of information.

Document Evolution

In spite of many pessimistic predictions, paper and digital will continue to coexist and remain predominant for different tasks. Electronic documents will take multiple shapes and formats. This requires some technologies that address the transparency of the document and close the paper-digital loop, as well as the richness in content, such as document transformation and enrichment software.

RELATED LINKS

Portable Document Camera is a typical example of a new information appliance: documents are scanned using a digital camera, processed in order to apply optical character recognition, enabling text integration in a word processor.

CopyFinder is a very simple yet clever component to address document evolution: by simply scanning a paper document, the user can find its electronic original or similar documents.

DiscoveryPrint provides document services such as printing and scanning to mobile users: Using wireless technologies, the MFD becomes a context-sensitive portal to securely access documents and document services; the PDA is used as a 'remote control'.

Summarisation and key phrase extraction are very simple tools that can greatly reduce the information explosion: by extracting a summary and key phrase of incoming documents, it becomes possible to store them in a Document Management System so that users can later search by key phrase or view a summary before actually opening the document, thus saving precious time.