Hi Dank,
Dan Brickley wrote:
OK, you goaded me into writing up what I was thinking about...
sorry didn't mean to be irritating - I'm very interested in the topic
myself, hence my reply.
So to take David's example,
Box 1: A journey exploring information about presidents, their kids
and their education...
box 1.1: All things that are US presidents
box 1.2: All things that are children of things in bag_1.1
box 1.3: All things that are educational institutions, attended by
things in bag 1.2
bag1.4: All things that are places that are locations of things in bag
1.3...
For the boxes, would be something like a tinyurl service interesting?
You could
potentially encode the entire query string long urlencoded parameter, but a
compact URI for interesting query results could be useful.
Each of the outer boxes captures a journey into some data. In the
Freebase/Parallax articulation, the data is from the same
mega-database. Obviously Semwebby people are fascinated by distributed
systems and standards, which is what I'm getting at here. The
conceptual model above - navigating by groups of things, is pretty
basic and potentially universal. The restrictions in old style boolean
query against bibliographic databases, or the set machinery in OWL,
are closely related. What I'd like to see is something in this
direction that can be made separate of UI, separate from particular
database, and universal enough to be taught in schools.
How about four operations: keyword search (to zero in on objects),
object focus (to
navigate from object to object), facet selection (to choose e.g. all
things of type
US President, or people who know you), and path traversal (children of
presidents,
people you know). Together with a suitable formalisation of the result
sets this
should cover at least basic interaction operations...
Regards,
Andreas.
