[Sigia-l] Disposable navigation systems

[Ted Han]

On 8/3/05, Eric Reiss <elr at e-reiss.com> wrote:
> I'm troubled by the term "disposable navigation." I hate buzzwords –
> and this seems to be heading in that direction.

I am similarly perplexed.  What is being discussed here sounds very
similar to how computational linguists play w/ corpora.  You have a
body of data, it may happen to be annotated w/ a proposed syntactic
structure (metadata), and the researcher is limited only in their
creativity and ability to transform the data into something useful to
them.  But i find it odd to call the results of their research
"disposable".

The thing about search systems, or other statistical tools for mining
corpora, is that they function on properties that arise out of the
content that you have.  Whether that in data or in metadata, your
ability to get something out, depends on what's in there in the first
place.  And most of the time, what's in a corpus is dependent on what
the corpus creators thought were important to record, or were useful
to them for some particular task (or set of tasks).

So, ultimately your ability to allow for, or facilitate radically
different types of navigation/transformation over the same data set is
going to depend entirely on whats -in- the data & metadata, not some
layer of configurability sitting on top of your content.

Anyway, my point is that i'm not sure what the utility of the original
definition gives us, because people are already using similar
methodology (if i am not horribly misunderstanding the original
ancestor post), and i'm not clear what insights such a view provides.

my 2 cents + queries for clarification,

-Ted