The ability to provide additional context to a document is a necessity. The documents can be in any file format rendered by any other piece of software. To generalize a solution for this kind of metadata, a common approach to providing context must be taken. When the new application is running, it will facilitate a screen capture ability that will allow specific regions of the viewable applications to be selected. The referencing document will have been loaded by its respective application. The researcher will be able to select the specific section that was of interest giving the additional context needed to the document. When the researcher wants to form an association, one or more atoms are selected, the screen capture is invoked, and the image of the screen selection is retained in SharePoint. The URL of the referenced document and comments are also stored as properties on the document thumbnail.

Customized InfoPath Forms
The previously mentioned metadata types are generic across all domains. Each domain, however, can have different and more structured collaboration that won't be shared across domains. In a lab environment, for example, when information is recorded in a lab notebook the same types of data elements are recorded for each task done. If this information could be captured in a more structured format, then it could be more easily reported on later. The alternative is attempting to reconstruct information captures across several lab books recorded by different people. For each of these tasks an InfoPath form will be constructed.

Use Case
The following diagram (Figure 3) depicts a simple use case of the proposed solution. In this use case, a researcher would like to add a note to a molecule and view a discussion surrounding one of the atoms.

Extending the Metaphor
In the context of this project, molecules were chosen as the site map to navigate the layered collaborations. This kind of collaboration, however, is easily extended into different mediums. For example, the same cancer researchers share images of cancer cells. Images differ from the molecular models only in that one has a three-dimensional representation of the site map made up of objects (atoms), and the other is a two-dimensional image. Because two-dimensional images have no inherent way to be decomposed (such as into objects of atoms), manufactured mechanisms have to be created. A mouse can select an area on the image and a hotspot would automatically be created.

The metaphor can be furthered extended into Word 2007 as the presentation layer. The toolbars can be extended to enable the same collaboration found in the molecules. A discussion could occur about a section of a paragraph in the document in the context of the document (not outside in an e-mail, for example). With the appropriate context, the collaboration metaphor can be extended indefinitely. Extended Word 2007 will fall into phase 2 of the C-ME project.

Office 2007 Reporting
Cancer researchers have to prepare reports to share with their colleagues and those funding their efforts. This is an extremely time-consuming and repetitive process. Typically it involves compiling data from many different sources. To facilitate this process and leverage the collaborative metadata being stored, a Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO)-based application will be created in Word 2007. This application will use the Word 2007 task pane to select the molecule of interest and the type of collaborative elements to include in the report. Once submitted, the Word 2007 VSTO application will reuse the same collaborative objects that the molecule and image rendering application will use. It will iterate through all collections of the selected metadata and format them in the Word document. For context to be maintained, each group of collaborative data elements will be accompanied by a static image rendering of the molecule with the respective atoms highlighted.

Conclusion
As this application is currently under development, it is difficult to draw many conclusions. However, what we've found so far has pleasantly surprised us. The prototype of the WPF application was built in about two weeks (granted the engineer is graphically minded and very talented). But two weeks is two weeks. Also, OSS is proving out to be a very capable platform to develop on as the provided application servers are much more robust than the previous version. Finally, the one-two punch of Office 2007 and VSTO v3.0 is allowing us to create rich Office Applications much easier than before.