We can see details; How can we see wholes?
There are countless FreeSoftware projects, websites, subjects, questions, repositories, books, individuals, and so on – it is very hard to see them in context, as a whole.
FreshMeat is nice, but that’s part of what the Johnson-Lenz quote refers to: “comprehensive directories.”
Similarly, in our world of “institutes,” “collaboratories,” and individuals dedicated to the study of CollectiveIntelligence, we have the same problem: myriad myriad myriad. Again, can have the difficulty of seeing the whole.
Some things that point towards ways of “seeing the whole:”
Here’s another example:
What is it to “look at a hard drive?”
Envision what it is to see the whole hard drive.
Every single file. Obviously, a small monitor can’t do it, but envision that an entire huge wall is made of monitor, perhaps part of the floors and ceiling as well, and that drawn onto the monitor, in 3-D perhaps, is your entire hard drive: All of the folders, all of the contents. And more than that, that the contents are transparent. You see the heads of all text files beyond a certain size. Folders that are teeming with little itty bitty files are actually, visibly, … folders teeming with little itty bitty files.
And you can see everything, or at least everything not occluded by something else, in a gigantic, glorious, display.
This gives us something of a sense of “seeing the whole.”
Now apply this to, say, search results. You search for something, and the enormous universe of stuff appears before you. Countless web pages, books, people, etc., etc.,.
This gives us something of a sense of “seeing the whole.” Or more appropriately, “seeing the wholes” – because there are many wholes, many ways of seeing entire collections.
This is not to negate the important question, “What about things that aren’t in the collection?” But it is to point to something that people aren’t really thinking about, that we should be thinking about.
Reguarding user interfaces: 3D is something to consider, because we are in a “real world arbitrariness” / chaos in display, and the arbitrary terrain / real-estate will have psychological and political effects, meaning that more degrees of freedom will be better.
There will be hoards of SemanticWebBrowser?s, for viewing all this data, all these wholes. Views of the semantic web will have independent URLs, and constitute a form of community digest in the form of a digest.
see also: SharedAwarenessSystem.
There are many aspects to this whole issue, quite a few of which are very much of interest to me this year. For example…
At present, we are building prototypes that combine the use of TiddlyWiki for Client-Side computation with OddMuse for “repository” functions. While this hybrid approach is somewhat surprising (even to us), it seems it provides an effective compromise of the respective capabilities that is adequate to our current needs. That being said, we are already starting to incorporate other external processing results from other environments such as external tagging systems that generate RssFeeds.
One of the interesting thngs about this type of Research and Development is that it is a source of delightful surprises regarding what is and isn’t really possible and practical!
Continue the churn… There is this theory of “wholeness” of Christopher Alexander. And there is the idealistic / marxist misconception of “the whole” I was often confronted with (the tale of the wise men and the elefant). Actually these conceptions are quite different (1) the whole as an organism like a city (2) the whole as “everything”. There is also the Doug Hofstaedter concept of intelligence / perception that builds very much (most intensely in the COPYCAT project, done my Melanie Mitchell) on the concept of slippage, a kind of stochastic pattern matching that allows to see the similarity in differing patterns. This allows for different solutions, depending on the perspective.
For example, “harddisk as a whole” for me (not necessarily for anyone else) means (1) how much is used, how much is free (2) how much of the used space is assigned to the various topic (might be 30% for programming, 20% for office related things, 50% multimedia data) (3) how much space could I make available on removing outdated or overly large objects.
Two quick notes:

The second is a quote from PeggyHolman.
I sense that we are all agreeing about some of the various aspects of this relatively complex subject. Some of the specific aspects that are consuming my time just now result from trying to push the envelops of…
A better way of stating that “My sense that we are agreeing…” might of course be better explained by stating that a number of these ideas are currently resonating with me, if only because of the contexts within which I am working.
The unique ability that all life is being built around is that of pattern recognition. Although computers are billion of times faster in crunching numbers, humans are unmeasurable better at recognizing patterns. There is this PatternTheory of ChristopherAlexander (I wrote this German Book MusterTheorie about) who localizes 15 fundamental properties of living systems. Two of these properties are tightly related to recognition / perception. One is named ECHOES by CA (I name it SIMILARITY). The other one is named ROUGHNESS by CA (I name it INDIVIDUALITY). Anyway, these are about “the identical in the different” and about “the different in the identical”. The constructivists (Piaget et al.) name this functions “assimilation” and “accomodation” IIRC.
To make long things short, there is an field of “pattern theory” outside of academia, that is slowly developing and that deals with such problems.
Helmut…
Hans, the pleasure is on my side. Beer or coffee is always welcome. I think you have my email address. Send me your postal address and I send you the book.