CoScripter Reusable History Drives Web Knowledge Sharing

February 22, 2010

CoScripter Reusable History is a new tool for knowledge sharing on the Web, designed to help users selectively share their web browsing history to simplify doing web-based tasks.

Researchers at IBM Research – Almaden have created a new web-based tool that provides users with an "actionshot" of their browsing activity on the web in an easy-to-read, reusable format that can be shared for future use. The technology, called CoScripter Reusable History, is now available on the IBM Research Labs Experimental Technology site that allows people to try, share and provide feedback on emerging technologies.

The tool is built on CoScripter, an ongoing research project launched at IBM Research – Almaden, to simplify web-based tasks and share knowledge of complex tasks and best practices across an organization. CoScripter is a system for recording, automating, and sharing processes performed in a web browser such as printing photos online, ordering business cards, opening a purchase order, checking flight arrival times or website testing. Instructions for processes are recorded and stored in easy-to-read text on the CoScripter web site, so anyone can make use of them.

"With so many areas of our lives moving to the web, it's natural to want to share what we are doing on the web with others," said Laura Haas, IBM Fellow and director, computer science, IBM Research – Almaden. "CoScripter Reusable History not only helps you remember what you have done on the web previously and share those steps with people in your networks; users can also tap into the valuable know-how of their colleagues to make time-consuming tasks easier to ultimately enable more efficiency and performance across an organization."

CoScripter Reusable History lets people continuously record actions on the Web in the background of a browser session and selectively publish logs of web browsing activity that may be of interest to other people such as registering for a conference, making travel arrangements, share knowledge about how to submit a budget for a conference or showing colleagues how to gather or analyze certain data. People can also share snippets of their relevant web activity with their social networks and colleagues on sites like Facebook or Twitter, publish them directly on their blog and share via email.

The tool records everything the user does on the web and captures a log of his or her web browsing activity. Users have the ability to review an "actionshot" of their history, find actions that they do often, convert sequences of actions into reusable scripts and share them with others. Privacy controls are built in so that sensitive data such as passwords are not recorded, and users have the ability to turn off the recording button as well as delete browsing sessions.