[Sigia-l] RE: what would porphyry do? (was apple and pears)

[John O'Donovan]

You could think of it like this:

A real world object may be classified by any number of parameters and is
unlikely to fit into a single hierarchical tree. This means you are
modelling complex patterns across objects where you have to accept that the
objects fit into more than one "pigeon hole". The relationships are more
like a network than a hierarchy but even this is to simplify.

For the sake of an example, you *could* think of the things or objects you
are storing information about like stars in the sky. Their position is where
they are placed in certain domains of knowledge and their shape and size is
what their attributes are. You can join them up in different three
dimensional constellations depending on your viewpoint and what you are
looking for. The results you get depend on this.

To model this sort of stuff it helps to know something about data modelling
and object modelling and a range of LIS issues.

Cheers,

jod

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeffrey Fisher" <jfisher at igc.org>
To: "SIGIA" <sigia-l at asis.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 7:57 PM
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] RE: what would porphyry do? (was apple and pears)


> [obviously, that should have been porphyry, not prophyry.
> sigh. what i get for trying to be all clever and stuff but
> not paying attention to my typing. - j]
>
> On Wed, 19 Mar 2003 11:51:22 -0600, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
> > On Wed, 19 Mar 2003 09:19:11 -0800, Peter Merholz wrote:
> >>  as the
> >>  field matures, it becomes clear that those graphically-oriented
beginnings
> >>  are not well-suited to the direction that IA is taking, which involves
> >>  understanding and portraying relationships within
> >> complex information spaces
> >>  that simply goes beyond what can portrayed in a pretty diagram.
> >
> > peter,
> >
> > this seems to me the most interesting and important point
> > in the conversation, thus far, not because it disses the
> > graphically-oriented beginnings, but because it speaks to
> > the evolution of interaction and communication and to the
> > challenges of adapting (so to speak) to the changes in the
> > local ecology. your statement here begs three questions
> > (which, btw, i see as a virtue rather than as a failing):
> >
> <snip>
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