SEMANTIC VISUALIZATION OF NONQUANTITATIVE
RELATIONSHIPS
--- CANCELLED! ---
Saturday, October 7, 2000 - 8:00am-5:00pm
Brian Boyle, bboyle@wenet.net
"Information is a difference that makes a difference." --
Gregory Bateson (1972) (in reconciling the contradictory
definitions of "information" by Claude Shannon, "father of
Information Theory" and by Norbert Wiener, creator of
"Cybernetics.")
This mini-workshop focuses on the emerging tools and concepts for
thetransformation, visualization and manipulation of "the next
dimension" of information, the inherently nonquantitative semantic
interrelationships. Arguably, all visualization is semantic: systems
transform and present data and information such that their
interrelationships' meaning - their semantics - is visible to humans.
The advances of our age rest on the expressive power, for communication
and basic understanding, of classic innovative transforms of inherently
quantitative dimensions such as isometric projection in space or the
now-intuitive left-to-right unfolding of time. But to escape the flood
of raw information available via the worldwide web and multimedia
channels, increasingly we must climb the ladder of abstraction to the
more refined level of the meaning itself, the qualitative
relationships that are only now beginning to emerge with more
intelligent search engines, more powerful abstracting systems, more
intuitive outlining and knowledge-network presentation systems, and
the emerging semantic foundation provided by XML, the richer, more
rigorous sibling of the first-generation Web's presentation-oriented
HTML As a concrete but only illustrative focus - to seed interactive
discussion with a timely, familiar and controversial topic - the
workshop facilitators have collected several examples from the legal
gladiatorial arena and transformed them into rudimentary XML documents
for examination: disputed software and business process patents -
highly structured textual and graphic documents with semantics as
precise and obscure as any programming language -coupled with some of
the relevant "priorart" from the software literature that might
invalidate those patents (or even kept them from issuing) if there
existed a method for the semantic visualization of the similarities,
differences and a metric of novelty and "nonobviousness." This has
been widely and publicly discussed by Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), Tim
O'Reilly (O'Reilly Publishing) and Dave Winer (creator of the
innovative and widely popular outliners, ThinkTank, MORE!, Ready and
now Frontier.)
WORKSHOP REQUIREMENTS
- Participation is limited to 20 people.
- Submit proposals to the organizers by August 15, 2000.
- Submitters will be notified of acceptance by September 15, 2000.
See http://www.erc.msstate.edu/vis2000 for updates on the
workshop requirements.
BIRDS OF A FEATHER (BOF) SESSIONS
Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions will be held Thursday
evening. These sessions will provide participants the opportunity to
discuss current topics with others. BOFs are open to all Vis 2000
attendees. If you wish to lead a BOF, please contact Rob Erbacher
(erbacher@cs.uidaho.edu). Be sure to check the final program to see
what BOFs are offered, and when you arrive, be sure to check for
additions.
