Hello all, my last post detailed an idea I had for an HCI project. This post, as promised, will detail the project which I will be undertaking as part of the HCI4 course at the department of Computing Science at Glasgow University this term.

The concept is a system which allows a group of users to collectively comment on a given base document. This document may be a set of notes for a course, a collective report which all members will be required to comment on, and so forth.

These base notes will be given as an HTML page which can then be augmented by adding notes to the page. This will add a link to the page which will allow other users to view the comments. It will then be possible to add responses to these comments and link back to other comments or webpages.

The diagram below shows the structure that the augmented notes will take:

This software may be used for a course website with all the course notes on it. Members of the class could then login and comment on the notes, they would also be able to respond to comments already given on the page.

This will allow members of the class to get the benefit of each others perspective, perhaps picking up things that they missed during the lectures. It will reduce the load on a lecturer as well as allowing him/her to pick up any misinterpreted parts of the lectures.

Hope you all enjoy, I will update with news when I start producing something.
- Chris