Angler is a web based tool. It is accessed through any standards compliant browser (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera). You will get the best experience using Firefox, since it's the browser that at this moment implements most of the new CSS properties.
The URL for the SRI Angler server is http://angler.ai.sri.com/. You must have a user ID and a password to log in.
To give a summary of what Angler does, without entering into the details of how it does it, is difficult. Nevertheless, you can think of Angler as a tool supporting several different knowledge tasks. Those tasks include brainstorming, clustering and ranking. The power of Angler comes from combining those task info a process flow, where the outputs of one or more tasks become the inputs of one or more other tasks. By doing so, Angler is capable of supporting complex practices such as Scenario Based Planning or SEAS Template Construction. To use Angler, a group of people decide to use to accomplish one of the tasks above. A facilitator that comes from this group, creates a Workshop, and it parameterizes it accordingly. The facilitator will select the set of people that are going to participate in the exercise, and lets all the participants know. The participants then get together through the created workshop (not necessarily at the same time) and collaborate on the given initial task. When the initial task is accomplished to the facilitator's content, the group will move to the next task, as determined by the process flow of the exercise. If this sounds abstract and vague, don't worry, the examples that follow will clarify the operation described.
This sub-section provides a minimalist view at the Angler cycle of supporting knowledge tasks. The context is a community of knowledge professionals (such as intelligence analysts) that must come together to solve a given problem. The cycle goes something like this:
The details of each of there steps are given in the corresponding help section, but now you will have a higher level picture of what Angler does and how participants go about being included in a workshop.
As with any web application, you have to log into Angler before you can really do anything useful. The login page at left displays the version of Angler that you will be logging into and the number of users that are currently using that server. If the protocol the page is using is https, then you have a secure connection to Angler.
Enter your user ID, and password. As soon as the system logs you on, you will directed to the Angler Manager (see below).
After logging in you will be presented with the Angler Manager. Objects are created and opened from the Manager, and this is the main page of the application. Angler implements a tabbed interface, and all the newly opened objects will be accommodated as another tab. There are only two tabs that are always present, the Manager tab, and the Console tab. The Console tab will only be available if you have administrator rights. The elements of the manager page that will be discussed below are: the banner buttons, the tabbed interface, the page toolbar, the search bar, and the object hierarchy.
The manager contains two types of workshops, simple ones and CrisisPaths workshops. The former are unconnected unit workshops that are handled in Angler normally, the latter are a special kind of workshops that string together with other workshops to support a more complex process. These more complex workshops are called composite workshops. There will be more on this later.