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From: madd@BUCSF.BU.EDU.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.society.futures
Subject: Re: Filtering A Global Hypermedia Network
Message-ID: <8711191414.AA15458@bucsf>
Date: Thu, 19-Nov-87 09:14:57 EST
Article-I.D.: bucsf.8711191414.AA15458
Posted: Thu Nov 19 09:14:57 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Nov-87 14:35:04 EST
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The ARPA Internet
Lines: 40

[About intelligeng filtering]
|But there is no good reason to collapse a hypertext into a stream in
|the first place!  A hypertext is a network, and if it is densly
|connected, you should rarely have a need to do global searches on it.
|Instead, you use your favorite index to find an entry point to the
|area your are interested in, and chase references from there.
[...]
|Local filtering on references might be useful
[...]
|But global filtering will be mostly unnecessary if the hypertext is
|any good.  It's a method for dealing with non-hypertext-ness of
|current media, and not the thing to be have foremost in mind when
|thinking about hypertext systems.

I think this is true.  Consider an example:  (relatively) recently the
Grolier Encyclopaedia was placed on CD-ROM.  A large amount of
processing time went into generating a fantastic cross-reference for
the encyclopaedia.  While this isn't hypertext by definition, you
can see how the idea applies; the computer was used to generate the
cross-links that would have been user-generated in a hypertext
environment.

Anyway, the cross-reference ended up being about the size of the
encyclopaedia but made it possible to find even obscure references in
only seconds WITHOUT A GLOBAL SEARCH.  This encyclopaedia dealt with
only a few megabytes (200?  something like that) though; it would be
interesting to see what would happen if you're dealing with several
magnitudes of that amount.

I suppose the only problem with hypertext is that the user might not
generate the extensive links that you might like, either through
laziness or ignorance.  In any case this problem will become more
serious as your database grows larger, so you'll probably need either
an automatic link-generator or some sort of global search mechanism to
help find items that were not properly linked.  I'd opt for the
automatic link generator since it'd be easier to search a database of
link topics than the entire database!

jim frost
madd@bucsb.bu.edu