technological infrastructures

To: fis@listas.unizar.es

A message of (hopefully) general interest to the participants of the FIS
virtual conference:

I believe that this event, the coming into existence of the FIS virtual
discourse, is very important,
and I want to contribute a few thoughts.

First: social bodies, capacity of natural languages (Koichiro Matsuno)
This is quite a select(ed) group of people, who are among the most
knowledgeable on this planet
about the matter of information (excuse the pun, Norbert Wiener). If I
am not mistaken, this
group is also able to exert quite a measure of influence on the future
development that the subject
is going to take. I find it very important that this group is (or has
the capability of) forming into a
societal entity by opening up this discourse. Koichiro Matsuno touched
on an important point
with his question about the capacity of natural languages. I would want
to enlarge on this in a
separate discussion, and what I mean by "social entity", and this would
cover some material that I
would like to bring in on the fascinating subject of societal
information. (I have made a starter
with my contribution to the FIS 96 special issue of BioSystems.) But I
must be careful not to try
to cover too many points here.

Second: problems for net discourses
I have watched a good many interesting net discourses becoming frayed in
trivialities and go
completely paralyzed. Or I myself felt paralyzed trying to follow them.
I remember one virtual
conference, which I thought was very interesting with respect to the
subject, of which I had to
shut myself off, because I couldn't keep the threads together. It just
consumed too much of my
time and energy. If anyone is interested, this is their URL.
http://www.newciv.org/ISSS_Primer/seminar.html

Third: necessity for technical information infrastructures
Keeping up, monitoring, and contributing to, inter-netted discourses is
largely a matter of
technical information infrastructures, and I believe, that we are not
quite there yet, what concerns
the right infrastructure tools. Unfortunately neither the email programs
nor the news facilities are
quite up to the task. Sending assorted mails and appending the issues
and former contributions to
which one refers, within the email body as comment, is quite hopeless.
One loses the overview,
and someone entering late, has practically no chance of catching up.

Fourth: some suggestions for technical information infrastructures
Wanting to keep matters short, I want to suggest a few things: The
organizer / moderator of the
virtual discourse will have a very hard time keeping things in shape,
unless assisted by the right
tools (and possibly some volunteers). I am presently building up a WWW
discourse myself, and
see myself in the same problem case. And I am also looking out for the
right tools. This depends
also "on a little help from a few friends", because no-one can keep the
rapidly moving SW
industry in surveillance. I believe there has to be an "information
infrastructure" group that can
address these issues, and I am willing to contribute a share. Formerly I
worked as a software
engineer, doing MM / HM development, and I have made some outlines for
DP (data processing)
infrastructures for supporting netted discourses. I am appending a text
in which I describe some
points that I think are essential.
One of the main infrastructure tools needed is for quickly and
automatically converting email
messages into browsable WWW html text, since this is the only way to
keep discussion threads
together which are simply impossible to follow with current email tools
(I am using the Netscape
email, which I think is more than crummy). Then, this necessitates a key
coding scheme for
emails, because if there is an automatic filter, it must have a unique
keying scheme, etc. etc.
Some email programs (not Netscape) allow to automatically pre-sort
incoming messages by
sender into bins. That also helps keeping track (a little). If this
facility is to be used, all emails
must come from ONE SENDER ONLY.
I suggest that we also find a way for distributing the papers of the
last FIS so that we don't need
to wait until next year or longer when they are finally in print. Since
these publications are also
usually not available in the local library, this is of no great help
anyhow.

I will keep it short, since I found it is a pain for me to read long
emails, and I don't want to
impose that on anyone else either. For more food for thought, see the
enclosed WinWord2 files.

-- 
Andreas Goppold 
URL: http://www.uni-ulm.de/uni/intgruppen/memosys/
c/o FAW Ulm, Postf. 2060, D-89010 Ulm , Germany
Tel. ++49 +731 501-8757/ -915 , Fax: +731 501-929