Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of Beyond Browsing: The Web of the Future

Timestamp:

Oct 21, 2009, 8:47:14 AM (15 years ago)

Author:

kthoden

Comment:

--

Beyond Browsing: The Web of the Future

@@ +1 @@
+{{{
+#!html
+
+    <h1>Beyond Browsing: The Web of the Future</h1>
+
+<p>The current paradigm of the web &mdash; in which the user
+<i>browses,</i> leaving behind a clicktrail that is of interest
+primarily to marketers &mdash; falls far short of the needs of
+scientists and scholars. <i>Browsing</i> the web is scarcely more
+interactive than <i>surfing</i> television channels. True
+interactivity &mdash; which will allow the web finally to achieve its
+potential as a medium for scholarly, political, and social dialogue
+
+&mdash; demands something other than the current browser/server
+paradigm. New tools will be needed, whose developers recognize that
+information <i>consumers</i> are also information <i>producers.</i>
+Scholarship is an inherently recursive activity, in that the scholar
+uses <i>existing</i> scholarship to produce <i>new</i> scholarship.
+Knowledge undergoes a process of accretion, akin to the formation of a
+pearl; one exemplary model is a page of the <a
+href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rs/2/Judaism/talmud.html"
+target="_blank">Talmud</a>, on which there is a hierarchical
+arrangement of commentary, super-commentary, annotation, and
+cross-reference that spreads from center to margin.</p>
+
+<p>Information production is possible within the web browser of today
+&mdash; using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki"
+target="_blank">Wikis</a>, or content management systems such as <a
+href="http://www.zope.org/" target="_blank">Zope</a>. But these tools
+seem like primitive intruders in an environment that was engineered
+primarily for publication. True interactivity demands a new tool: not
+a <i>browser,</i> but an <i>interagent.</i> With these ideas in mind,
+for the past few years, the <a href="http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/"
+target="_blank">Max-Planck-Institut f&uuml;r
+Wissenschaftsgeschichte</a> has been developing, in collaboration with
+
+<a href="http://www.harvard.edu/" target="_blank">Harvard
+University</a>, a prototype interagent called <i>Arboreal.</i>
+Arboreal allows for flexible, non-linear navigation of arbitrary XML
+documents and for granular annotation of these documents down to the
+word- or term-level. Annotations themselves are XML data, which can be
+shared, published, and further annotated in turn.</p>
+
+<p>Natural language is the primary means by which humans communicate
+&mdash; though it is supplemented, of course, by formal languages and
+other symbolic systems and by pictures and other audio-visual media.
+Yet today's web browsers provide only the crudest tools to support
+natural language documents. Most linguistic support in browsers is
+focused on visual <i>presentation</i> of text in some writing system.
+Even in this area, the technology comes up short: what browsers can
+properly render Chinese or Mongolian in their traditional vertical
+layouts or can adequately deal with Japanese ruby?<sup><a
+href="#fn1">1</a></sup><a name="m1"></a> Beyond display, browsers also
+typically allow for the <i>searching</i> of text &mdash; but again
+only in an unsophisticated and inflexible way, which is of limited
+value even for most western European languages, and is thoroughly
+inadequate for highly inflected languages or languages written in
+complex scripts.</p>
+
+<p>Tomorrow's interagents must provide more sophisticated linguistic
+capabilities: language technology must be available from within the
+interagent. Yet this is not to say that language technology should be
+<i>built in</i> to the interagent; such a monolithic approach can only
+fail users from complex and diverging linguistic, ethnic, and
+professional backgrounds, and with equally heterogeneous needs and
+interests. Rather, a <i>services-oriented</i> architecture is needed,
+in which the interagent can communicate with linguistic web services
+(via, for example, <a href="http://www.xmlrpc.com/"
+target="_blank">XML-RPC</a> or <a
+href="http://www.w3c.org/2000/xp/Group/" target="_blank">SOAP</a>) and
+dynamically acquire new linguistic behaviors (via the dynamic
+class-loading mechanisms offered by frameworks such as <a
+href="http://java.sun.com/" target="_blank">Java</a> or <a
+href="http://www.microsoft.com/net/" target="_blank">.NET</a>). Again,
+Arboreal has been designed to implement these techniques: via web
+services it can acquire morphological data that allow for lemmatized
+searching, lexicon lookup, and other language-based functions. In
+addition, it supports pluggable language behaviors that allow for
+dynamic transliteration of writing systems such as Arabic, Greek, and
+Chinese and for orthographically-normalized searching that renders the
+spelling peculiarities of (e.g.) early modern texts transparent to the
+user. These are critical and basic functions that will serve as the
+foundation in the future for a richer set of facilities, including
+term and keyword discovery, language-neutral searching based on
+concepts rather than words, automatic summarization, and sophisticated
+semantic linking.</p>
+
+    <hr>
+<h2>Notes</h2>
+<ol>
+<li><a name="fn1"></a>Cf. Y. Haralambous, <q>Unicode et typographie:
+un amour impossible?</q>, <cite>Document Num&eacute;rique</cite> 3/4
+(2002), 105-37. Ruby annotation is dealt with in a W3C recommendation:
+
+<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/ruby"
+target="_blank">http://www.w3.org/TR/ruby</a>. [<a href="#m1">main
+text</a>]
+</ol>
+}}}