[Sigia-l] RE: 3-D workflows

[Matthew C. Clarke]

Joe 10 Enterprises <joe at joe10.com> wrote ...

> What I mean is, Flat is fine for us who enjoy information but tends
> to elicit blank stares from the suits, so we dress it up with 60
> degree angles and they "get it" for some reason.
>
> But it still rubbed me the wrong way, so I printed Georges map and
> nice arrangement of multivariate data. Then I went to Dynamic
> Diagrams to find they'd nuked Mapa from their offerings.
>
> Next I found a site mapping tool I bought a while ago and played
> around and came up with this:
> http://www.joe10.com/sitemap/isom/map.html
> then this:
> http://www.joe10.com/sitemap/flow/map.html
> and finally this:
> http://www.joe10.com/sitemap/cloud/map.html
>
> All of which are pretty silly if you ask me.

Not so silly. As with most visual representations perhaps they could be
improved, but the basic idea -- a 2D map of an information space, showing
thumbnails of the points in that space and showing linkages between
points -- is fine.

The "cloud view" reminded me of two similar diagrams:

* Peter Vlastelica pointed me to www.sonymusic.com/licensing recently. Click
on "Browse" and then click on a search term. See the connected bubble map
that appears on the right to depict inter-relatedness between keywords.

* Someone on this list about 6 months ago mentioned a site-mapping tool that
represented the map seemingly on a sphere. The currently selected page was
central, with linked pages scattered around it. As the link-depth increased,
the pages receded around the "horizon" of the sphere. You could also type a
search term and the matching pages would be highlighted. (Can anyone
remember where that was?)

> And it occurred to me;
> 1) the Web isn't 3 dimensional. Neither is information.

I gotta agree, neither are 3D. But if that is supposed to imply that it is
2D then I gotta disagree. The Web and the majority of information spaces are
hugely multi-dimensional. Many of the web user interface tools reflect this.
A faceted classification, for instance, or a search engine that allows
multiple fields to be filled in, imply that the underlying information has
multiple attributes -- each of which is a dimension in the information
space.

Notice, for instance, the slider on the right edge of the Sony search screen
mentioned above. That shows a "third" dimension, namely time, that is
missing from any of your site maps. What happens to site maps over time? If
they change (and of course they do), then any accurate information
representation requires a time dimension. This point is made more explicit
by the WayBackMachine at http://www.archive.org/.

Now, as you point out, the passage of time and other variables do not
*necessitate* a 3D visual representation, but our various techniques for
displaying on a 2D screen are frequently designed to mask the real
complexity in the information being thus represented.

Matt.