Re-Use? Is this Re-Use?

Abstract:

In this paper, we investigate the notions of re-use: at least as it has been understood by many computer-scientists, as was probably used by the Intergeo project description, and what it can mean in a more realistic setting.
The paper first defines the technical re-use: the one that expects a real data operation of "copy and deploy" as and its implementation in the i2geo platform.
A simple experience in Intergeo has proven that this is a far too restricted view: when an teacher is gathering resources, he gathers them because they are interesting; for some of them, he can easily "copy and deploy" but, for many, there's a little itch that prevents the copy and deploy to be useful... "Not bad! Redoing it in my favorite geometry system will be easy!"
This paper investigates the re-use methods and proposes that users should be allowed to explicitly mark the links of being a copy of, a relationship that applies to the copy operation as well as to many other re-use methods (copy-and-paste, imitation, transclusion...).

Published:

, 2010

[PDF]Re-use-is-this-re-use.pdf