Beyond Keyword Search.
How Can we Do better? Tuning Knowledge, Building Interaction.
dr mc schraefel
While most of us might want information seeking interactions as if we were on board the Starship Enterprise, asking the computer to help gather and analyze data so we could work out "what if" scenarios through wonderful 3D holographics, most of our current information seeking actions are more reminiscent of late 19th century book requests to the British Library. That is, fill out a form for a resource; have that resource or set of resources delivered back to us. Each time we make a request, too, we start a new form; new search. Little or no context is maintained. No information kept. The only added feature to the process is that if the clerk processing the requests gets to know the visitor, books s/he thinks the visitor might find more interesting based on past requests get put to the top of the stack. So while we're not in the 23rd century, how might we advance our knowledge building interactions beyond the 19th? Some of us think part of the solution is in the preponderance of newly available linked data - including personal, social and public information, and the metadata around that information.
