Category: Dynamic Knowledge Repository

Frode asks (Facebook status update, 20151027) “Is interactivity a crucial or trivial part of text, in terms of knowledge work?”

The trivial superficial response is “trivial”. The deeper crucial response is “crucial”. But beyond the wordplay gamification:

I’ll respond in terms of “how we experience text”.

When I am “reading” as in “consuming text”, inasmuch as “text” can appear like what used to be called “paper”, and inasmuch as paper could be viewed as “non-interactive”, then the answer here would be on the “trivial” side of the question.

Insofar as we are LIVE, as in living beings, and living beings shift focus from object / issue to object / issue, and physically move, and receive dynamic stimuli from varied sources… then as we “experience text”, we will need to contend with a number of distractions, and attend to a number of ancillary needs, as we try to extract as much meaning and understanding as possible from that text.

• For example, I may encounter a topic, concept, or term that I am unfamiliar with. I may most optimally need to divert myself to addressing that knowledge gap so that I can then optimally experience the original text / document with the best possible frame of mind to leverage that text for whatever purposes.
• In another example, I may want to drill into a particular presentation or line of reasoning, and may want to “lay it out” spatially, or reorganize it some way, so I can look at associated “nodes” or “chunks” of knowledge, to really follow implications and make the most of the connection points between the material and my existing mental model.
• I may need to put my ingest of the material (reading) on “pause”, as life gets in the way of my full attention. After the distraction, I may need to reconstruct my mental context, which may have been lost while I dealt with the demands of that life distraction.l
• I may want to create a citation, or note, or “transclusion” of some sort… so that I can add a snippet or the entire work into my “personal knowledge repository”.
• I’m sure I can come up with more use cases…

So my more serious response is that interactivity is a key enabling mode that can be designed, optimized, adapted, etc. so that knowledge work can be as effective as possible.

When discussing application, infrastructures, protocols, messaging, etc. it is necessary to precisely agree on semantics of expressions in order to avoid “mistakes”. However, HTML as a representation format has survived largely due to its ability to “tolerate” expressions that are not understood… the browser just ignores those expressions. That has allowed “backward compatibility” of HTML and browser versions, as new language constructs can be introduced that are just seamlessly (mostly) just ignored by older browsers.

Recently, Frode has introduced a need to discuss representation formats. One very strong reason Frode likes HTML is this ability to tolerate expressions that are not currently understood.

Sam (I) was asked by Frode today “If you went off on your own today with $2M+ to build something, what would you build?” I recalled my early 90’s desire to build a “spreadliner” – an application (we thought in terms of apps in those days) that could take a chunk of text, and allow those memes to be spread out spatially so that visual relationships could be depicted (not just mind-mapped), and also have individual nodes / chunks / memes that could be attributed so that they could be viewed in tabular, or spreadsheet, views. Fundamentally, I (Sam) seek knowledge representation that can allow multiple presentation modes (Doug calls them viewspecs), clearly separating the KNOWLEDGE from the PRESENTATION OF THAT KNOWLEDGE. (reference here to GlobalSIM vs GlobalVIZ).

In order that the knowledge be presentable in multiple views, we must design knowledge representation in such a way that metadata required for one view be non-harmful to the fundamental knowledge object, or to other views.

What is still a question is WHERE this metadata ought be located. Is it a part of the knowledge itself? Arguably, it is NOT essential to the knowledge itself, but to the viewspec / presentation mode that is being applied at viewtime.

More to be mulled…