2003-07-28 The Next Big Thing Inc Chair: . Wendy Hall Panelists: . Paul de Bra . Peter Murray-Rust . Ted Nelson . Peter Nuernberg . Cathy Marshall -> this is associated with a special issue of the Journal of Information (and there's a call for papers with this) [might have to get that one] premise: each person has 5 minutes to pitch us their big idea. * Paul de Bra talking about AHA! illustration about difficult authoring... 26 pages, but already the concept structure graph is really complex. so what do you do for 1000s of documents? best adaptive systems are when the user doesn't notice things changing -- so if they use the system twice it should change. adaptations should be very subtle. "adaptive hypermedia" [there's something going on here, not quite sure of the distinction] * Cathy Marshall trend 1: computers become boring tools for communication, reference, news. just the browser and email. people don't even use file systems (everything is stored as attachments). boring (sometimes annoying) infrastructure "you've got mail!" trend 2: everything is recorded/saved desire to record, cameras everywhere, projects like myLifeBit "it turns out that everyone wants their own 15 minutes, but they don't want to be witness to anyone else's 15 minutes" trend 3: reference becomes recreation googling has become more compelling than link-following or even trail-blazing and trail.sacing googling transcends gathering to become casual, recreational people on their wireless networks having a conversation and when a topic comes up they look it up online. [i can identify with this...] but people can't get back to what they found, hypertext has failed them. business plan, that follows these trends: . dimensional hypertext: capture and browse activity/interest across modes of access (tv, reading, etc) . personal -- nobody else shares your interests . perpedicular -- travel across time, hypertext time machine * Peter Murray-Rust "to transclude the data and environment of a scientific experiment" for communication, verification, reuse, extension, historical record "robots will act as information prosthetics for scientists" read journals, repeat experiments he claims: . most scientific data is never published . experiments are duplicated enemies of scientific progress... all your data is taken by your publisher, you squash it to word and gif, they turn it to PDF, then rekey it and send it out again eg, SVG spectrum which can be analysed is destroyed by publishing it. and then copyright is owned by the publishers and database owners. so they've developed DATAMENT "hypermedia for science", a seamless integration of data and document: rotatable molecules, editable molecules, SVG spectrum to view, etc. these are being produced by 3rd year undergraduate chemists in cambridge, producing ontologies etc. hyperstructure in SVG, wow! he's proposing *lossless publication* -- publish to the www before the publishers get their hands on it. they're *already* doing this! 250,000 annoted OPEN hypermolecules in their World Wide Molecular Matrix. they offer free calculation/computing in return for more molecules. [summary says: "that revolutionary idea that we own what we write"] during questions: all publishing models should be shaken up by different sorts of distribution. * Ted Nelson problems . you have to sign up for everything . you're being spied on . everything's getting more complicated on the macintosh: "once simple and unreliable, now rock-solid and incomprehensible" "everything is designed for people who need to know too much, or for an imaginary stupid person" we need to design for the intelligent but clueless beginner. the issue was always the design of imaginary constructs and their ramifications, not electronics of the innards of computers. computer languages are written as long strings. string matching against opcodes, etc, compiled as an executable. but people think it's about reality. it's not! so he proposed zigzag. unified package, same on all platforms. the code is all in the hypertext. a simple new beginning. [sounds like Lisp machines, or Smalltalk.] during questions: "all categorisation decays, and all ontologies are doomed" -- the way to solve this is set undergraduated going through what's forgotten in the hope of serendipity q - is it possible to start again? a - [now, he just said that they're working with symbian to make a completely zigzag based phone] ... yes, for a while, but it decays more-or-less over time [ooh, good rant by nelson during questions during adaptive hypertext. he was editing a magazine and turned down an article by alan kay. three years later, he accepted the same article (identical!) submitted by someone else. he'd changed as a person. so media should never change, so you can go back. this is his fear about the loss of knowledge that was mentioned in the keynote. you should be able to see the same thing 10 years later, that other people see, etc. "coaccessibility" is one of the most vital features in any media. yup!] * Peter Nuernberg "the best thing to do is just take an existing product and add a clock to it" hot or not is really popular. so how to add a hypermedia clock to that? [laughs] so, do "are we linked or not?", where you see two websites and rate how much they're linked. build a big community hypertext. this would be really useful data! [in a sense, aren't weblogs doing this, for a small self-selecting slice of the population?] oh, and he's promising free beer.