[Sigia-l] Less Spatiality, More Semantics?

[Donna M. Fritzsche]

It sounds like there are a couple issues being touched on here:
1. Should content be placed in taxonomic /hierarchical structure and 
allowed "to live" in only one place?

2. Should content be placed in taxonomic /hierarchical structure and 
'live" in one place but have multiple points of access depending on 
user task, need, etc..  This multiple point of access could be made 
possible my use of the appropriate metadata attribute/value pairs.

3. Should content not be placed in one specific taxonomic 
/hierarchical structure but be tagged by metadata  that accommodates 
multiple points of access depending on user task, need, etc. (see 
above)

4. Should users be given a method of accessing information that is 
based on their needs as expressed by their own words (natural 
language processing plus AI-like identification of content.)  Very 
difficult, AI researchers have been working on this for years.

To me, the question is not so much "meaning", which is a very 
difficult task, but "intended use", which is somewhat less difficult 
because a human can more easily intervene by tagging documents and 
doing task analysis.

Some of these issues were tackled by myself, Fred Leise, and Brett 
Taylor on a recent project.
We will be publishing more detailed examples at some point in the future.

Donna M. Fritzsche
Partner
Amichi, LLC
Strategic Knowledge Architecture and Information Design
www.amichi.info


>
>
>Andrew was careful to distinguish spatial processing from semantic
>processing. He acknowledged that both are important, but that, currently, we
>as IAs favor supporting spatial processing, largely because it is easy.
>
>What Andrew means by spatial processing, as I understand, has to do
>primarily with the notion that we "navigate" information, and that we have
>to create tools (navigation bars, breadcrumbs, explicit hierarchies) to
>assist people in navigating it.




>In doing so, we don't address the separate, and possibly deeper, issue of
>*semantic* processing. We're not very good at helping people deal with the
>meaning of information, and capitalize on how people process semantically.
>
>I felt this tied right into Mark Bernstein's section on his panel (as well
>as his later talk), where he encourages IAs to acknowledge the messiness and
>complexity of information, and not to obscure this with an oversimplified
>structure designed to ease navigation and promote findability. His point is
>that these attempts at easing navigation actually make it harder for people
>to find stuff, and for them to draw understanding from the material, because
>these navigational devices obscure the actual relationships of the
>information.
>
>A big theme of Mark's talk(s) was "multivalence is not a vice," which I also
>think ties into this quite neatly. In an effort to achieve clarity and
>understandability, we often attempt to reduce our presentation of
>information so that everything we offer has a single, obvious purpose. Mark
>finds such reduction foolish, claiming that there's no information that
>isn't multivalent, that couldn't be used to support a variety of purposes,
>and that we need to acknowledge, and, perhaps, celebrate that.
>
>One thing that both Andrew and Mark commented on is that what they're
>talking about isn't easy to grasp, present, develop methods for. They're
>challenging us to tackle a difficult issue, instead of relying simply on the
>more facile crutch of just spatiality.
>
>--peter
>
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