Experiments with Oval: a radically tailorable tool for cooperative work

This article describes a series of tests of the generality of a “radically tailorable” tool for cooperative work. Users of this system can create applications by combining and modifying four kinds of building blocks: objects, views, agents, and links. We found that user-level tailoring of these primitives can provide most of the functionality found in well-known cooperative work systems such as gIBIS, Coordinator, Lotus Notes, and Information Lens. These primitives, therefore, appear to provide an elementary “tailoring language” out of which a wide variety of integrated information management and collaboration applications can be constructed by end users.