We have developed a platform for providing access to activity-related data as a service. This platform, called WAX, leverages emerging technologies such as lightweight web services and the semantic web. Building on the WAX platform, we have developed a web-based activity management system that is based on a semantic representation of activity.
Users can add people to an activity, send email to people involved in the activity, add related resources (web pages, documents, RSS feeds, and other artifacts), schedule events and deadlines, and define sub-activities. Activities are represented with an extensible RDF ontology, enabling end users to dynamically end the activity schema with their own domain-specific properties.
WAX's REST APIs also enable existing applications to be easily extended to incorporate activity data, thus bringing activities out into the applications people are already using for their work. Our EAM plugin extends the Mozilla Thunderbird email client to provide contextualized activity information (see the activity pane in the lower-left corner).
By querying the WAX service to identify activities involving the sender of an email, EAM can show the activities most relevant to the email message being displayed, thus making activity data directly accessible from within the user's regular email client. Users can drag and drop messages from Thunderbird into these activities in order to associate them with the activity; in future work we plan to integrate algorithms for automatically classifying messages into the most relevant activity.
We also provide an ActivityBar plugin for Mozilla Firefox that shows all activities that list the web page currently being viewed as a resource. For example, the Atom web page displayed here had been added as a resources for the ``WAX Development'' activity; users visiting this web page will see that activity listed in the ActivityBar as a relevant activity.
In addition, users can associate a web page with any of their activities by navigating to it in a browser and pressing the ``Add page to activity'' button, which lets the user choose from the list of her activities. ActivityBar also integrates with our online enterprise directory; when visiting a user's profile page, the ActivityBar will display all activities in which that user is a participant. The button on the right also changes to ``Add user to activity''.
These examples show how lightweight web service interfaces to activity data enables activities to be woven into the applications and processes that people already do. Besides enabling the rapid prototyping of novel interfaces, we hope that the simplicity of the WAX API enables users to easily ``remix'' activity data and encourages the emergence of novel uses of activities beyond hat was envisioned by the original designers.
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