Alex, Eric, here are some thoughts,
-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Shapiro [mailto:alex@touchgraph.com]
Sent: jeudi, 13. septembre 2001 05:30
To: unrev-II@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [unrev-II] Semantic Community Web Portal
>I'm still of the opinion that a graphic display mechanism only works for
>small demos,
>because the complexity quickly grows too great with respect to the
>available display
>area. Given whiteboard-sized LCDs, I *may* be persuaded to change my
>mind.
Oh, I didn't mention I had white board size LCDs? To me, it seems that
the
problem is not limited display area, but the high degree of
interconnectedness of information. A large screen would not help, because
closely related items would end up far apart, stretched between other
relevant items.
The solution to this problem, is to only show a subset of the graph at a
time. So far, the only tool to do so is theBrain, and it only shows a
very
small window into the data. There are much better ways. Have you checked
out this paper by the
way? http://www.cs.vu.nl/~frankh/postscript/VSW01.pdf What to you think?
The problem with displaying sub-graphs is that they are not disconnected
from the rest of the graph. These ralationships between sub-graphs should be
visible. In my concept mapping applet I attempted to display sub-graphs in
the same display area so that interconnections can be made and shown. It
works but it creates a usablity problem because of all these sub-graphs open
within the same area. There must be something that can be done visually to
solve this but I haven't had the time to address it correctly.
>(I'll have to see, to be sure it works.) But I'm pretty darn certain
>that graphic displays
>of complex, interrelated information, simply will not fly with today's
>display devices.
...
>I think that is close to a good definition of the target. But it needs
>to carry
>connotations of "conversation" and "document aggregation", as well. My
>"HowTo" folders contain dozens of messages with little factoids I've
>gathered
>on various subjects. That knowledge base needs to be sharable and
>searchable.
Sharable is easy, you just publish it (zip it, post it, whatever, it's a
joke anyway). Searchable is harder. My view of searching is that a lot
of
work has been done on searching after-the fact. You write something, and
then you use a machine to go back and find what you (or someone else) has
written.
I don't think sharable is easy. Sending something is easy but that's not
sharing. Sharing means you need to address issues of multiple personal
views, comments, awareness, same time editing. It's a whole research
program. Sending documents (or graphs or whatever) back and forth for
changes and comments does not work well in practice.
However, a non-linear document would allow for searching to be build in to
the document. The author can anticipate what the readers will search for,
and provide the links right there. Also, readers can add links if they
think two pieces of information are relevant.
The author can only anticipate some stuff but the actual value will come
from what the readers find in the document which the author could anticipate
nor perceive. This will usually be a result of links made to other documents
which the readers know and the author doesn't.
I was thinking more of ratings based on relevance to a particular
subject. Or truth. Say non-obvious interesting facts would be highly
rated, while obvious or uninteresting statements would get a low
rating. The 'who' that the facts are interesting to, would be the
participants in the forum, with the goal being to come up with a single,
objective (within the group) opinion.
Of course, ratings could be made relative to some context. This would not
be hard. The same facts could be reused in different discussion
groups/contexts, and given different ratings in each.
...
Eric, I think that we are talking about representing two different types
of
information. You seem to be talking about time-dependent information, and
also description of processes. In my mind this is a hard problem.
To me, something easier, is to build tools for discussing timeless
information like scientific truth, or philosophical arguments. Maybe
forming a plan of what should be done for a particular project can also
fall into this category. But my vision of this, was that the plan would
be
formed, and then followed, not altered in the process. Maybe altering the
plan would be a whole other process with stable versions in the
middle. Still, I think it would be hard to come up with something that
gives you 10 tasks today, and 8 tomorrow.
I'm not sure what truth is so let's not get into this. However, timeless
information is hard to find. "scientific truth" is continually changing as
our instruments to probe the world keep changing. I don't know of plans that
are not changed by the process of implementing them. So any tool we build
must take the notion of change extremely seriously.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0.0 : Thu Sep 13 2001 - 02:47:25 PDT