Information Representation

I love the history of information representation, or rather, I'm loving the revolution that the web has introduced into our oh-so-proud information-driven society. Information is key to the former rise to success, and the current leading position, of the western world. However, with the come of the Internet, as we all know, we are entering a new era of such information representation. I'm no hippie, and wish to look past the ideas of freedom of information, the public domain, globalisation, and all that, because there's another fundamental change which I find far more exciting!

This article, by Andy Inhatko, reminded me of this change, and the need to direct a certain part of my free time into this research, because, needless to say, this is very important to both my book and the wiki project I'm working on. So, allow to outline what I've got spinning around in my mind.

Getting Things Done by David Allen(which, don't worry, I haven't read, and only heard of) states that it is a good idea to organise ones files in a fashion that has nothing to do with their contents i.e. lexically. Now, notice how that is the exact way of organising dictionaries, references, phone books, digital file-systems, and a magnitude of other things. I find this idea interesting, because it's rather clear that there are more often then not, more than one way to order things consistently, and thus, if one has to order such things, then rather do it in a manner that is biased to the content that is to be ordered.

Thus, lexically ordering a dictionary is a far better way to order it, then say, based on the origin of the words, mainly for two reasons. One, is that our knowledge on the origin of all the words in a dictionary may be limited to a certain subset, i.e. be incomplete, or even worse, incorrect. The other reason is because the spelling of a word has nothing to do with it's meaning. It is a biased ordering technique. Interesting how the introduction of a completely different system allows us to easier find something in, or understand a part of, a completely unrelated system. After all, the meaning of a word is written as a sequence of words, thus, somehow outlining it's origin, or purpose, but we find it using our knowledge of the alphabet. Furthermore, this is viewed as a less stressful technique, so it is easier for us to jump from one system to another, rather than follow a single (complicated) path; that, I find interesting.

Andy, on the other hand, outlines in an enclosed manner, the negative sides of this, trivial method of organisation, and the only thing that lacks outlining is how the web completely trumps that idea. The reason is simple, and it is that in a book, in a conversation, or in any humanly-readable input and output, information is linear, but is there anything linear about the information contained in your brain? Is there anything linear about the way you remember all the things that you do? There's several ways to explain an if-then-else statement, and the human mind is able to do exactly that, provide many examples, differing in origin, but describing the same structure or idea.

One could say, that out of a messy network, for a linear request we can gather a linear response, be that through conversation or writing.

The funny thing about that is, that the web allows us to mimic that sort chaotic network structure of information and upon a linear request (search query) return a linear result (search results). The only thing that remains, is to make it personal, and we've got a product that can completely change the way we interchange information.