Thank you
Questions?
- Question: please advise on visualization strategies for mapping
semantic relationships - can you provide references or web links for
research programs in this area?
- There are some important things. it turns out that people can't cope
with too many things in one diagram, so you need ways of collapsing out
the stuff that isn't immmediately relevant. So you are looking at
something like how to understand that you say zoo and I say menagerie,
and the meanings overlap. I can't provide good references for
visualisation research in this area, but most of them would be from
traditional graphic communication augmented with the ability to do
dynamic presentation. There is certainly work in this area in teh
semantic web - tools such as IsaViz with its Graphic Style Sheets, and
GraphViz which represents such information. People who studied sets,
in maths (I did it in early high school, and at a simplistic level in
lower grade school as a prelude to multiplication) will recall ways of
showing that some things are in one or other set, and some are in a
couple at a time. And that the diagram gets very complicted very
quickly. Fortunately on the Web we have dynamic formats like SVG, so
you can concentrate on the thing immediately at hand...
- Question: is PICS a good role model for metadata?
- response: A good role model... Hmmm. In the sense of being there
before it is. PICS developed into RDF - the language that W3C now uses
for the semantic Web. PICS (and in another way Dublin Core) demonstrate
the problem with "flat" models - with RDF you can build up layers of
complexity as you realise the complexity of the problems you deal with.
It is all very well to call a page of pictures and text a text
document (as Dublin Core currently does) but for accessibility that
isn't enough information. Similarly PICS is really just name-value
pairs. It is very hard to describe the relations between relationships
in PICS. But it did have the feature of demonstrating that allowing
anyone to make the statements is an important step forwards.
Bye - thanks again
