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http://www.bestnet.org/~jwalker/course.htm

Starting 1 February 1999

Introduction to the Internet and On-line Learning
How to Search the World Wide Web Level 1
Using Eudora Lite and Pro Level 1
Using Eudora Pro Level 3
Using Netscape Messenger Level 2
Using Netscape Messenger Level 4

Starting 15 February 1999

Using Microsoft Outlook Express Level 1
How to Search the World Wide Web Level 2
Creating web pages with HTML Level 1
Creating web pages with HTML Level 2
Effective Use of E-Mail
Eudora Pro Level 2
Using Netscape Messenger Level 1
Using Netscape Messenger Level 3
Using Netscape Messenger Level 4 (a)

The following is an excerpt from the CSS Internet News. If you are
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New `Conceptual' Search Tools Discard Old File Structures 

NAT TUNBRIDGE 
c. New Scientist
http://nytsyn.com/IMDS%7CCND7%7Cread%7C/home/content/users/imds/feeds/
nytsyn/1999/01/25/cndin/7022-0038-pat_nytimes%7C%7C/home/content/users
/imds/feeds/nytsyn/1999/01/25/cndin/7019-0035-pat_nytimes%7C%7C

         It's dark. Surrounded by inky blackness, you are alone in a
void. Away in the distance loom several indistinct shapes which, as
you zoom closer, resolve into clusters of text. Words appear:
``Sports'', ``Entertainment'', ``News'' ... As you fly toward News,
it sprouts bright lines that link it to still more words, such as
``Today's headlines'' and ``Yesterday's features''. Descending into
the last of these brings up more refined choices: Politics, Health,
Science ... You dive into one of these, and there before you is just
what you are looking for. 

         This surreal scene is not from a fantasy space game. It's a
demonstration of Galaxy of News, a software tool designed to
simplify tasks such as navigating through a newspaper's website. 

         The idea is to give you an overview of the entire content
of a site on a single screen, so you can home in quickly on the
article you want. Galaxy of News is just one example of an idea being
developed by a small group of companies that aims to revolutionise
the way we gather, analyze and visualize information. 

         These pioneers all depend on giving computers a new
interface geared to spatial searching. Data will be displayed on
screen in a way that lets you find what you are after simply by
reaching for it -- like pulling the item you want from the shelves of
a well-organized stock room or library. Clever graphics give the
impression of three dimensions, and the field of view changes at the
click of a mouse, allowing you to search from side to side and back
and forth. Long lists of files or hyperlinks will be banished for
good. 

         But what's on offer is not just fancy window dressing.
These displays are being linked to smart software that can
``understand,'' at least to some extent, the concepts contained
within document files. This clever code can take a mass of
unstructured data from, say, a web search, sort it by content and
decide how that content should appear on your screen. The upshot is a
completely new view of information, which is unlocking secrets that a
conventional search would never reveal. 

         Every computer system has some kind of user interface-a
layer of programming that sits between the raw data in a computer's
memory and the user, and dictates how that data is presented on
screen and how the user interacts with it. Those in common use today,
such as Microsoft Windows and the Macintosh operating system, are
based on metaphors that were chosen to be familiar to people in the
1970s and 1980s, such as filing cabinets and paper documents. But
treating a computer like an old-fashioned office severely restricts
the way people can interact with it. 

         Windows, for example, closely parallels the way computers
organize the data they store. Users are still expected to negotiate
a hierarchy made up of lists of directories and subdirectories
stuffed with lists of files. In effect, the computer forces us to
adapt to the way it works, instead of the other way round. 

         The World Wide Web is little better. True, the advent of
hyperlinks means it no longer matters where in a computer a file is
stored-or even on which computer it's stored. But too many websites
expect surfers to click through endlessly layered lists of
hyperlinks to reach the information they are after. 

         ``There is no reason why we have to access data in that
way,'' says Earl Rennison, who devised Galaxy of News (
http://www.perspecta.com/indexCorp.html). ``It's impressing the
limitations of the physical world unnecessarily.'' 

         Human beings are used to locating things spatially. ``The
human/computer interface is much more effective if it works in a way
that's closer to the way we think,'' says John Peterson, who is a
co-founder of Object/FX (hhtp://www.objectfx. com), a
Minnesota-based company that makes visual interfaces for geographic
information systems. But this goal of ``humanizing'' the interface
does not need super-sophisticated 3D graphics. Sometimes it's just a
matter of redrawing a hierarchy of directories and files in two
dimensions in a way that is more intuitive to its users. 

         That's the plan at Inxight (http://www.inxight.com) of Palo
Alto, California, a spin-off from the nearby Xerox PARC. Inxight's
Hyperbolic Tree software rep-resents a directory as a wheel hub.
Subdirectories or files within it appear at the end of spokes
radiating from it. Click on a subdirectory and the image warps,
bringing it center-screen and magnifying it, while the hub you began
with moves to one side and gets smaller. 

         ``We mimic the way a human being works,'' says Ramana Rao,
chief technology officer at Inxight. ``When you turn your head to
look at something, that object becomes the center of your
attention.'' 

         Thanks to these continual changes of perspective you can
find the file you want without losing sight of the whole hierarchical
file structure. Rao dismisses more advanced 3D visualization packages
as unnecessary. In any case, most desktop computers do not yet have
the processing power needed to run them. 

         The potential uses of the Hyperbolic Tree are huge. Take
the trend toward Internet shopping. In today's online supermarkets,
even buying a bag of tomatoes can be a trial. You head first to the
Groceries section, which presents you with a list. From there you
select Fresh Foods, and wait for another list. Finally you reach the
vegetables, where you scroll down the list to pluck your tomatoes.
Each list can take ages to download. 

         The Hyperbolic Tree avoids all this. It displays the layout
of the whole supermarket on a single screen, with every section
represented by a hub and every item it contains at the end of a
spoke.

         Inxight designed the Hyperbolic Tree to be bolted onto
other applications. And this is already happening. Microsoft has
included it in its Site Analyst program, as a tool to give website
designers an overview of the structure of their sites. This helps,
for example, to find broken links when a page is moved. Less
specialized applications are also starting to emerge. Later this
month, Inxight plans to release a file browser to complement
Windows's File Manager. It will be available from Inxight's website. 

         Of course, not all information comes as neatly organized as
a computer's files and directories. But the new interfaces can handle
unstructured information from memos, letters and newspaper articles,
so long as it has first been processed by one of the increasingly
smart search engines and data mining tools that decide by themselves
how information should be structured. 

         Last October, for example, Cartia of Redmond, Washington,
launched a program called ThemeScape, which turns unstructured
information from a database or Web search into a topographic
landscape. Just how the land lies is decided entirely by the
program. 

         MILITARY INTELLIGENCE 

         At the heart of ThemeScape is a text-processing engine
called SPIRIX, which combines statistical analysis and the simple
grammatical rules used by humans in natural language to locate key
concepts. The methods it uses were devised by American military
intelligence and are still closely guarded by Cartia. 

         But at a simple level, it separates a sentence into its
constituent parts and looks for common themes. So, ``The cat sat on
the mat'' would be broken down into subject (cat), verb (sat) and
object (mat). If the following sentence read ``It licked its fur'',
the program would associate the ``it'' with the subject of the
previous sentence, and so make a connection between the cat and fur.
In this way, the concept that cats have fur and lick it becomes part
of the program's ``understanding.'' 

         SPIRIX extracts these concepts and creates a set of them
for every document in a database, which it then places within a
multidimensional matrix. In essence, it calculates multiple virtual
``locations'' for each document, based on its content. A document on
terrorism might contain concepts such as violence, fundamentalism
and explosives, and will be represented in the matrix by these
concepts. Documents that share similar concepts are placed near to
one another in the matrix. 

         CONCEPTUAL NAVIGATION 

         ThemeScape then plots these concepts onto what looks like a
relief map of an island. It has light-coloured mountains, dark
valleys and sharply defined ridges. A mountain grows where a cluster
of documents share similar concepts. The more documents there are,
the higher the peak grows. Each area of the map is labelled to
indicate the general concept it represents. And any documents that
have nothing to do with the mountain's topics are dumped into the sea
around the island. 

         You use ThemeScape to explore the data using what Don Mason
of Cartia calls ``conceptual navigation.'' Clicking the mouse on a
particular area zooms you in on it, and drills down into the data
landscape to reveal details of the documents beneath. In this way
it's possible to locate a single document. But the real beauty of
ThemeScape, says Mason, is that is gives you a bird's-eye view of a
body of information without having to read any individual documents.

         ThemeScape can analyze around 250,000 documents
simultaneously. It allows users to home in on the information
they're interested much more quickly than they could by reading down
a long list of keywords. Importantly, the overview can also reveal
general trends that would otherwise remain hidden. 

         Mason recalls demonstrating Theme-Scape to an American car
maker, which used the system to map its entire database. From the
mix of e-mails, reports, memos, news feeds and assorted data, an
island began to emerge. One surprisingly prominent peak on the island
related to a technology that the company had abandoned. In this
mountain were old memos dismissing the idea, together with recent
news reports that a Japanese rival was filing patent after patent on
the technology. 

         The discovery, Mason reveals, sent executives scurrying for
their mobile phones. ``It's competitive intelligence,'' he says.
``This was a piece of information that would have been lost among
hundreds of thousands of documents, but which the right
visualization technology could reveal.'' 

         As well as dealing with a large number of documents,
ThemeScape can be put to work on a single large document. It took
less than 3 minutes, for example, to map the Starr report into
President Clinton's inappropriate relationship with Monica Lewinsky (
http://www.cartia.com/screenshots/screenshot-menu.html). 

         Another view of the Starr report has been concocted by
Semio in San Mateo, California. Like ThemeScape, SemioMap (
http://demo.semio.com/public/discover.cgi) carries out a conceptual
search, but it lays out the results in a different way. Its findings
appear as a vast three-dimensional network of interlinked hubs set
against a background of stars. Click on a hub and you fly toward it.
As you get closer, other more distant hubs come into view.
Double-click on one of these and it reveals the passages of the
report to which it refers. 

         One consequence of this trend toward conceptual navigation
is that the location of the data will become ever less important.
Think about searching for information stored in someone else's
computer system. As things are now, you have only the directory and
file names chosen by somebody else to guide you-names that are often
too personal and cryptic to mean much. 

         But a tool able to read all the document files and extract
the major concepts within them would make a big difference. ``The
new systems switch the focus from where something is to what it's
about,'' says Mike Lynch, chief executive of Autonomy, based in San
Francisco, which produces a data categorisation and navigation tool
called AgentWare. 

         Taking this notion further, Lynch speculates that in future
users will not need to see any form of file structure at all. A
natural-language analyzer will interpret the user's needs and locate
the information. And, unlike Web searches conducted today, there
will be no poring over list after list of hyperlinks: the entire
search will be laid out conceptually on a single screen. 

         At present, most of these tools are aimed squarely at
corporate users. The reason is simple. ``Individuals won't pay for
it,'' says Peter Martin, vice-president of sales at Semio. But
companies that need to make sense of large bodies of information
will pay whatever it takes to give them a competitive edge. 

         Eventually, Martin reckons, the new tools will trickle down
the familiar pathway to computers in people's homes. When Lotus
produced the first commercial spreadsheets, he says, it marketed
them to companies, not individuals. After people became accustomed to
using them at the office, demand grew for them to be made available
at home. ``That's what'll happen with graphic display devices,'' he
says. ``They'll be tried out and paid for by corporations, then home
users will come in.'' 

         The first outward sign that the new search tools have
arrived will be the changing interface: the switch away from the old
document metaphor. Rennison compares today's interface designers to
the earliest film makers. ``To begin with they shot movies just like
a play, with no cuts or camera movements,'' he says. ``It took 50
years for the real language of the medium itself to be expressed.''
If the change from document metaphor to spatial search is like the
switch from, say, silent movies to talkies, it's clear we can expect
some pretty spectacular changes to the interface in the coming years.

----------------

Also in this issue:

- Entrepreneurs Profit From Y2K Bug
    LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) _ If the millennium computer bug leaves
    supermarket shelves barren, cities powerless and communities in
    chaos, Roy Leonard's $2,000 Magna-Chair might come in handy.
- New `Conceptual' Search Tools Discard Old File Structures 
    It's dark. Surrounded by inky blackness, you are alone in a
    void. Away in the distance loom several indistinct shapes which, as
    you zoom closer, resolve into clusters of text. Words appear:
- GRIC leads way for `pay-as-you-go' Internet services
    Welcome to the "second-generation Internet," where you can get phone
    and fax service, voice mail, conference calling, e-mail and
    e-commerce all through one service provider--and all on one monthly
    bill. 
- The Cool Site of the Year Awards
    Has the Web sold out for Hollywood-style glamour? Not yet 
- Consolidation continues in Internet sector 
    Feeling lost in the midst of all this media merging? Here is a guide
    to help you through it. 
- Women.com to Find a New Home 
    Women.com, the pioneer among online women's magazines, has trailed
    in the publicity wars for several months behind high-profile
    competitors, but it is now set to sign a prize deal of its own.
- India's Net Obstacles
    NEW DELHI -- India has lifted its state monopoly on Internet
    services, but a host of obstacles are preventing an immediate
    explosion of cyber activity in the country. 
- Saudi Arabia launches limited Internet offerings 
    Saudi Arabia began offering Internet service to local providers this
    month, allowing local inhabitants cheap access to the World Wide
    Web, industry officials said on Sunday. 
- Privacy groups to announce boycott of Intel products
    WASHINGTON (AP) -- Privacy groups will announce a boycott Monday of
    all products from Intel Corp. until the company agrees to disable
    new technology in its upcoming line of Pentium III computer chips
    that helps identify consumers across the Internet.
- Intel Agrees To Change Its Chips (late breaking news)
    WASHINGTON (AP) Intel Corp. bowed today to concerns by privacy groups
    upset over new technology that allows consumers to be identified as
    they move across the Internet.
- New Lists and Journals
    * NEW: Vocabulary Builder
    * CHANGE: fostering, social work, adoption, child welfare
    * NEW: midlife-depression (for women)





On-line Learning Series of Courses
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