Building Bibliographies. Tim is finishing up his dissertation, and now
needs to put together a bibliography of works cited from the ETD library.
He has to cite five dissertations, all from the Virginia Tech collection.
What steps does Tim have to take to have the system generate a bibliography
for him of those five papers?

My suggestions: He can just enter the names(or ids) of the dissertations 
and press the "Build bibliography" button. He may also need to enter his dissertation
name or id.


Comparing & Contrasting. Joan is conducting research on mockingbird
migration patterns, and she has found two dissertations that pertain and
are of similar structure. In order to quicken her research, it would be
beneficial to be able to view both papers at the same time in a manner that
lends itself to comparisons. How does the system present the papers? What
features enhance the capabilities beyond that of two windows?

My suggestions:

Use some hot key to exchange from one window to another since this is faster 
than moving mouse. Also we can highlight some keywords in both documents
to help the comparision.


Jargon Search. John is an undergrad conducting research for an English
paper on modern coffee shop design. However, she encounters a fair amount
of architectural jargon that she is unfamiliar with. It would be of great
help if the system could find other references to these words, and present
them in some context that can help convey their meaning. How do you
envision this system working?

My suggestions:

Maybe he can first enter the domain (in this case modern coffee shop design),
and then enter the jargons he doesn't understand after press the "Jargon explaination"
button the system will present the explainations of each jardon to him (there maybe 
several explainations for one jardon) . another way to do this is that he just click on
the word he don't understand, the system will ask for options for that word, one of
he operations will be jardon explaination, if he choose it the system will present
the explaination to him. 


Find Open Problems. The first step in starting a dissertation is finding
the topic, and Moe is having trouble finding a good open problem to solve.
There is an extensive collection of ETDs on his area of interest, and he
would like to system to identify open problems based on what is stated in
the texts. What steps would he take to have the system identify potential
problems for his research?

My suggestions:

I think this is a hard problem to solve, maybe some AI technoloy is needed to solve it.
All I can figure out now is that the system will search some keywords in the summary of 
dissertations since it's probable that authors will put problems need to be solved in 
this part.



Find Influential Articles. While reading over some theses, Katie notices
that several of them make reference to the same papers or authors. Since
there are over two dozen papers on her topic, it would take to long to
correlate all the references. It would be nice if the system could
determine which papers and/or authors are cited most, and present the
content in which they are cited from each paper. What would best enable
Katie to do this?

My suggestions:

First she need to enter the name or ids of the papers on her topic, then the system 
will present to her all the articles cited by those papers with order (ranking), they
are hyperlinked, when she click one the system will present the titles of all the papers
which has cited this article, and when she click on one of them he system will presnet
to her the paragraph/sentence of the paper which mentioned the article. She can also 
highlight several articles and the press a "Both cited in" button, the system will present
the titles of he papers which cited both of the articles. There may also be a button of
"Any cited in" which will present titles of papers which cited one of he articles she selected. 



Find Common Approaches. Liz, a chemistry masters student, is putting
together some experiments and would like to research approaches taken
before. There is ample material available on this type of experiment before
in the ETD library, so she turns to that source for information. How could
the system easily present her with paragraphs talking about the approaches
taken in a range of papers?

My suggestions:

This is also a difficult problem to solve unless we put some structures one all
the dissertation format, let people follow the format when submitting a paper.

Maybe each document shou;ld be regarded as an object not a static text, then we can easily
develop some functions to fullfill the changing need of users of the system since we encapsulate 
the data structure we use to store the document. 



Assemble Syllabi by Concepts. Sam is planning a new course that combines
multi-variable calculus and differential equations. He has a set of
concepts that he would like to cover, but isn't sure as to what order to
present them in and which methods to present due to time constraints. What
would the system be like that could help find the best order and methods to
present this new class in?

My suggestions:

I think this is also difficult to solve. Maybe the system can provide some 
experience knowledge which were input into the system by other people who
are using the system.



Find Different Ways to Present a Concept. A student in Cal's Physics class
is having a lot of difficulty understanding Newton's Laws. Cal has
explained the principles several ways, but has run out of ideas. Thus he
comes to the courseware library looking for alternate methods to explain
this concept. How would this system work to find different methods of
presenting Newton's Laws?

My suggestions:

He can just type in "Newton's laws" to the system and press "methods of presentation"
then the system will prpide all the presentation methods about this concept to him, he can pick
up one which he think is proper.