SIGIA-L Mail Archives: SIGIA-L: Information Architecture
SIGIA-L: Information Architecture
From: Jerry Wilson (holodigi_at_altavista.net)
Date: Mon Nov 20 2000 - 18:42:49 EST
Your job Mr. Wilson, should you choose to accept it, will be to
facilitate the transformation of data to knowledge for the warfighter.
Professor Hartman writing on "the Structure of Value" established, in
analogy with Bertrand Russell's definition of number, that value is the
intention of all intentions similar to a given intention. From this one
can conclude (it is left as an exercise for the student) that the value
of something is unique to the seeker. And so it is with knowledge.
Mortimer Adler, one of the foremost geniuses of our time, in his book
"How To Read a Book" identifies two types of reading; 1) reading for
pleasure, and 2) reading for knowledge. He lays out the requirements
for gaining knowledge from a book. There are many gems of wisdom
pertinent to the IA in this book and I point to two: 1) the readers are
ultimately responsible for gaining the knowledge they seek, and 2) the
readers must ponder what they are being told within the pages. The
structure of the book is the authors responsibility and is designed to
let the readers quickly determine that this book is relevant to their
needs, or not. This is accomplished by the Title, the Table of
Contents, the dust jacket synopsis and review excerpts, the preface, the
abstract, the bibliography, the index, etc. Computers and the internet
add to this source selection process the concept of hypermedia which
brings associations to third party opinions, citation indexes, text
inversion, thesaurus, reviews, critiques, etc. As an IA, my goal should
be to optimize the seekers connection to this diverse, distributed and
supporting knowledge base.
The concept of "pondering" appears to be important where new knowledge
is sought. Pondering prepares the mind to recognize important,
pertinent, information when it is observed. Having thought about what
"it" could mean usually makes it easier to recognize what "it" is when
"it" is observed. For the warfighter, pondering is running scenarios of
possible actions and reactions. It is the mathematician making numerous
approaches to solving a problem. Inventors do it. As an IA, I need to
support the seekers in their pondering.
So, I conclude that as an IA I must provide tools that assist the
seekers in capturing what is of interest to them. I must give them the
support for organizing their thoughts. Part of the thought organization
process is to permit diversion from, and recovery to, a primary thread
of investigation, the pondering, the what if, the mind chatter, from
which insight may ultimately spring. My tools must allow thoughts to be
freely associated with other thoughts at the whim of the user. I must
track the pertinent references and allow the user to annotate the
threads he creates. I must allow the seekers to establish
classification schemes for all references and notations and my tools
should perhaps recognize rules inherent in the seekers classifications.
Can I build a context from the threads? Can I fuse the data; the
information? Can I provide clues such as sources known but not
investigated; what have others searched for that might relate to what I
am searching for and with what results? Is collaboration critical to
the development of knowledge? Should I be able to initiate
collaboration with other seekers and the authors? Would collaboration
be more powerful if my tool established a community of experts directory
with interest in topics related to the particular focus of
investigation? Such groups, it seems, would tend to be transient.
The seekers as they read and ponder the text and graphics on discovered
pages should be supported in highlighting items of interest and taking
marginal notes. This could be accomplished with a remotely or locally
maintained overlay of the page that is synchronized with all screen
actions. It should be able to accept and reproduce graphical notations,
pointers, marginal notes, highlights, and even hyperlinks to other pages
all developed by the seeker and tied to the page of interest. All such
overlays should be editable, mailable, printable, fileable, etc. The
overlay might also maintain a copy of the search sequence that
ultimately arrived at the page in question. All of this supports the
seeker in his goal. It allows recovering the thoughts and
reestablishing context after absences.
Are these concepts pertanent to the commercial sector? I'm not sure
I've recognize a point of view within the IA discussion that truly
addresses the knowledge seeker. I believe the IA's are focusing on a
particular vendors product and are trying to "capture" the seekers
interest, rather than recognizing that their page(s) is one of perhaps
hundreds that the seeker will visit trying to make some sort of decision
between brands. The IA then is influenced by a marketing imperative in
his/her design. Nothing wrong with that, but it puts a narrow
perspective on the role of IA in support of the knowledge seeker.
Jerry D. Wilson
Systems Engineer, Computer Scientist
DoN
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