Organizing Connections
Online communications offer vast opportunities for interconnecting people and information. How to organize the vast access in a way that realizes the potential without being overwhelming is a crucial, ongoing challenge.
The communications challenge used to be in the actual effort to share your info, whether you were corresponding interactively or publishing stuff. In the emerging age of instant online communications, that effort to share info is tending towards zero, and the challenge has become organizing the almost unlimited wealth of connections, so that what's relevant can be found where it's relevant. Contemporary technology, like hyperlinking, smartly indexed search, syndication, transitively connected social networks, and so on provides many for exquisitely elaborate interconnection of all that stuff, but what's generally lacking is comprehensive, progressive scoping, so that details are relatively as near to other details depending on how closely related they are.
To put it another way, navigating the currently prevailing online world is like living in a sci-fi world where every neighborhood or building is connected to others by teleporters. Provisions like comprehensive indexing and search engines provide means to jump into vast collections, and hyperlinks provide the means to jump around from place to place within those collections, but none of these things help for getting a comprehensive sense of scope - for realizing where any place is situated with respect to other places, according to their informational content.
In fact, informational neighborhoods don't necessarily bear only a single relationship with each other - their proximities differ depending on the concerns by which you're considering them. A personal and a business site may be similar in having answers to audiophile questions, but very different in most other ways. What it is that I am suggesting would be useful, and what I'm working on, is a way to arrange for describing different connections between informational neighborhoods according to different contexts. Here are some specific examples illustrating specifically how such a thing would be useful:
- Disseminating information about regional activities across local activity groups within that region, where an "activity group" is a group of people that gathers, physically, to do some activity together. See the purpose described in Interconnecting Groups of People.
- Progressively developing news stories, with room for different perspectives on the significance of events, or even which events are salient. See Evolving News: Turning Answers Into Stories.
- Managing personal information, with many details that belong in more than one context
The focus of my response is development of a way to organize collections of details so that details can reside in multiple places in each collection, with the option for different characteristics in different places, and so that different collections can be interconnected, so they can act as extensions of one another - so that the federation of collections can extend the scope of the respective collection's element relationships across the collections. I sketch out the basic characteristics in Spherical Database Characteristics.
What follows is descriptions of ways this scheme for a spherical database could be applied.
| Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Interconnecting Groups of People | Organized online support is needed not just for interconnection within affiliated groups of people, but also for organized interconnection between such groups. This describes how that would be useful, and how such support could be arranged. |
| Interconnecting Groups of Details | There is a gap between the contained organization of details in a document on the web and the infinitely intricate and haphazard interconnection of details between documents across the web. A comphrensively extensible means for organizing details within and between web sites can remedy gap, enabling... |
| Extensible Organization | Details of an extensible facility for organizing details and connections. |
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