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detailed

Dimensions of Knowledge

(1) Multi-Instances:

Information can be arranged in terms of similar meanings. For example, manuals of different authors often represent different views on the same subject of knowledge. Another name for this is parallel information.
There is simply too much similar content! To process the subjectivity component, we can connect and browse fragments from variety of sources, which actually describe the same underlying idea in different words or terminology.

In addition, by expressing key ideas in other words, we can create our own version of any document (including these White Pages). As there can potentially be many views of the same document, we should integrate them into main content. For example, Allison Powell uses multiple viewpoints of a document and allows users to move among these viewpoints:

"Users can move from one view to another multiple times... Utilizing multiple views of a document collection will provide multiple opportunities to gain understanding of the material covered by the collection... We propose that this aspect of using multiple viewpoints of a collection can be very effective when exploring a collection. Similarities revealed by an alternate view of the documents may serve to link groups of documents that use different terminology for the same concepts or may lead to interesting documents from a related discipline" /Allison L. Powell (Department of Computer Science, University of Virginia), "Exploiting Multiple Viewpoints for Enhancing Retrieval", DL'98/.

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(2) Levels of Abstraction (Granularity):

Information could be represented in its digest, normal, and detailed form. The more details, the less summarization, and vice versa.

Technologically, working only with high levels means transferring less volume of data, and therefore using less memory and time!

As a visual example of how information can be arranged in different levels of abstraction, I would recommend to take a look at the design of the book, written by such authority on object-oriented technology as David Taylor / "Business Engineering with Object Technology", John Wiley and Sons, 1995/. Every (!) paragraph in that book has a short summary, - analogue of the highest Level. It is evident, Dr. Taylor, the author of awards winning 'Object Oriented Technology', one of the best-selling books in the history of computer science (as it stated on the cover), is quite comfortable to think in terms of information objects. Remarkably, in the book, along with blocks of text, pictures also are identified as objects and have their highest Levels:

In the computer world, the representation of compact/detailed versions might be implemented as follows:

I would introduce a notion of 2D-Info Space, which links dimensions (1) and (2), bringing them together:

(1) information is arranged in blocks of similar meaning- Instances /views to the same object/, and

(2) each Instance can be viewed with required Levels of abstraction.

You can "travel" through your knowledge base both instance by instance, and level by level. You are free to jump ahead and backwards, up and down.

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The term "2D-info Space" is not affiliated with trademarks of the InfoSpace, Inc.
Copyright(C) Sergiy Beloy