WPv4: A Re-imagined Walden’s Paths to Support Diverse User Communities

The Walden’s Paths Project, as part of our philosophy of continual evaluation, actively seeks out user communities who may find our system to be of interest. In the past few years we noticed a recurring trend of user issues, needs, and sought-after features. In order to better support our users, we initiated a redesign of Walden’s Paths that not only solves these problems, but enables us to perform more rapid prototyping and experimentation of new features and interfaces. In order to accomplish these goals, we have created a web service that handles the storage, modification, and representation of our path data structures. This service is completely isolated from user interface layers, allowing many different interface designs to be implemented on top of the basic Walden’s Paths data structures. We also present several prototype interfaces - Marginalia, CoWPaths, Walden’s Drupal, PathCompiler v2, mWalden - that represent new areas in which we believe our ideas can be applied such as collaborative work, location-aware services, large educational databases, offline presentation, and mobile computing.