🚀 go-pugleaf

Henry Choy writes:

>Suppose that a computer system generates tons of useful information
>and plunks it into a public library. Further suppose that the
>information is in pretty raw form; the uses for this information are
>not demonstrated by far. One of the bottlenecks in showing how
>information to be used is that you tend to say "this piece of 
>data can be used for bloody well everything". Determining the
>uses for the information may be a much greater task than discovering
>the information itself. How can this information be organized so
>that people can find and use a lot of it?

I think history has shown that one doesn't always know in
advance the utility or importance of a particular piece of
information, i.e., it's value to future researchers: the
location of black gooey stuff in various parts of Texas
was fairly unimportant until the internal combustion engine
came along.

Therefore, one's accuracy in determining the usefulness of a
piece of information is probably inversely proportional to
the length of time in the future one is trying to determine.

That obfuscation being pronounced, how can information be
organized, particularly "huge chunks" that may or may not
be related (in terms of computerized information). 

I think the use of hypertext is the way to go, if it isn't
too much of a bureaucratic headache. Hypertext of course,
begs the question of how and which links to set up in the
first place, but I think that's a bit more straightforward.

Dano