Sense from a Sea of Resources: Tools to Help People Piece Information Together

Spurred on by the eager adoption of XML, the world appears to be on the verge of a revolution in the ease with which information resources from diverse, remote providers can be brought together into new assemblies, expressing new concepts. To benefit from this revolution we will need frameworks that help providers to organise their information and enable access to it, and tools that will help would-be users of these resources to find and combine the pieces that they want. We report our ongoing research on the Topica framework and the Context Workbench, that together address these new challenges in a spirit of helping information users to make their own sense out of the sea of possibilities.