The notion of layering also struck LYNCH as lurking in several of the
projects demonstrated. Several databases in a sense constitute
information archives without a significant amount of navigation built in.
Educators, critics, and others will want a layered structure--one that
defines or links paths through the layers to allow users to reach
specific points. In LYNCH's view, layering will become increasingly
necessary, and not just within a single resource but across resources
(e.g., tracing mythology and cultural themes across several classics
databases as well as a database of Renaissance culture). This ability to
organize resources, to build things out of multiple other things on the
network or select pieces of it, represented for LYNCH one of the key
aspects of network information.
Contending that information reuse constituted another significant issue,
LYNCH commended to the audience's attention Project NEEDS (i.e., National
Engineering Education Delivery System). This project's objective is to
produce a database of engineering courseware as well as the components
that can be used to develop new courseware. In a number of the existing
applications, LYNCH said, the issue of reuse (how much one can take apart
and reuse in other applications) was not being well considered. He also
raised the issue of active versus passive use, one aspect of which is
how much information will be manipulated locally by users. Most people,
he argued, may do a little browsing and then will wish to print. LYNCH
was uncertain how these resources would be used by the vast majority of
users in the network environment.
LYNCH next said a few words about X-Windows as a way of differentiating
between network access and networked information. A number of the
applications demonstrated at the Workshop could be rewritten to use X
across the network, so that one could run them from any X-capable device-
-a workstation, an X terminal--and transact with a database across the
network. Although this opens up access a little, assuming one has enough
network to handle it, it does not provide an interface to develop a
program that conveniently integrates information from multiple databases.
X is a viewing technology that has limits. In a real sense, it is just a
graphical version of remote log-in across the network. X-type applications
represent only one step in the progression towards real access.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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