The End of the World (Wide Web) / Part II

[Gerry McKiernan]

        Thanks to all for responding to my posting Bye Bye HyperText:
  The End of the World (Wide Web) As We Know It!

        Yes, it's rather an obtuse point of view that some immediately
  understand, while others don't [I guess it's like Zen [:->]

        Being a frequent visitor to the Web, I have been underwhelmed by
  the linearity of hypertext [it's just text you know]. Although
  revolutionary for its day, hypertext still places a burden on the user
  to analyze, synthesize and interpret the data/information that is visited.
  Even the major advances with meta-tags do not capture the 'meaning' of
  of an entire document.

  In a way, this is analogous to descriptors or subject headings serving to
  represent the meaning of a paper or book - it's good and useful but limited.
  Eugene Garfield recognized the inherent limitations of the traditional
  indexing and applied citation indexing as a valid (and perhaps more useful
  means) of identifying relevant documents on a particular topic.

        My appoach is analogous. Need we limit our efforts to locating
  information within documents on the Web, purely by hypertext links to the
  metadata that represents these documents, or to the pure text of these
  documents.
        Instead,
            can we not consider extracting or summarizing the full
            text of these documents, and offer to the user the
            'concepts' that the words of the document represent.

        Instead, can we not present to the user the clusters of Web
            documents that share common concepts, whether or not
            they have similar or related metadata packaging. Can
            we consider presenting to the user, the set of relevant
            of documents, not as text, but as a 'information' landscape,
            cityscape or InfoSphere(sm) ala VizNet in which the clusters
            are represented by topographical features or a sphere with
            highly relevant documents at the Point of Interest and
            those of less 'relatedness' located at a distance from this
            point.

        Of course, the Web is Not Dead. What I posted was a vision [hey,
  that's visual ! [:->] of possibilities - an extension, extrapolation,
  application of current and emerging technologies to The Web Infosphere,
  inspired in part by a current review I've undertaken on 'Information
  Visualization' in Web and non-Web databases. For details, you may wish to
  visit the project description at URL

        http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/BigPic.htm

        My hope is to complete the review and establish the beginnings of
  the clearinghouse at this URL by the end of this month [I hope]. My plan is
  to use the same format, I've used for my Project Aristotle(sm) which is
  a clearinghouse devoted to projects, research, products and services devoted
  to 'automated categorization of web resources' accessible at URL

        http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/Aristotle.htm

        I agree that the general ideas profiled in this posting are
  provocative, obtuse, unrealistic, radical, logical, etc. and thought
  afterward that it would be useful to speculate more systematically about
  the future development and maturity of the Web in an article of some kind.

        Thanks again for your response!

        Regards,

  Gerry McKiernan
  Coordinator, Science and Technology Section
  Reference and Instructional Services Department
  Iowa State University
  Ames IA 50011

  gerrymck at iastate.edu

  http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/

                   "The Future is Visual"