[Sigia-l] Findability is dead, Long live ummm... Meaning?

[Peter Merholz]

So, at the now infamous Spatial Navigation Panel Thing, I dashed off this
note to myself, which I titled "Findability -- context -- meaning":

     The problem with findability is that it favors known-item searching.
     There is a Thing out there, and you develop a space to help people find
     that Thing. This elevates certain types of cues ‹ navigation, metaphor,
     classification.

     BUT, in my experience, most information tasks aren¹t about finding ‹
     they¹re about understanding. And understanding is built through
     relationships, connections, meaning... SEMANTICS.  And so, as
     information architects, we need to design systems that treat those
     issues ‹ facets, linking, hyperlinks, relationships.

A few more thoughts about this...

There's nothing wrong with supporting known-item searching. It's a big hairy
problem, and a valuable one to solve.

Supporting "understanding" is really hard to define. It's squishy. Vague.
Easy to interpret in a number of different ways. This doesn't mean we
shouldn't try; it means that we should expect this to be a long, hard,
arduous process. 

At the summit, we saw some early and interesting attempts at supporting
'understanding' - Celia Romaniuk's talk on FOAF and "Eastenders", or Brett
Lider's presentation on enterprise ontologies.

Not like we don't already have too much stuff to keep up on, but the IA
community needs a firmer grounding in hypertext and hypertext research. The
Web is still a whole lot about 'the link', and the Hypertext Community has
been thinking about this a lot longer than we have.
Some ones I've found with a wee bit o' the Google
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman/HT96/
http://www.fxpal.com/PapersAndAbstracts/papers/gol97a/
http://www.mri.mq.edu.au/~mariam/flexht/program.html
http://portal.acm.org/browse_dl.cfm?linked=1&part=series&idx=SERIES399&coll=
portal&dl=ACM&CFID=9201358&CFTOKEN=21750743

Lookit this:
http://tinyurl.com/8ank
"Semantics happen: knowledge building in spatial hypertext"

Oh, and then there's that whole distinguishing between unhelpful metaphors
(those which are too literal and thus constraining) and helpful metaphors
(metaphors in the more Lakoff-ian sense, metaphors that help us understand
'semantic processing').

The more we know, the more we know we don't know.

--peter