Doug Engelbart's  I N V I S I B L E    R E V O L U T I O N

thoughts on the future : the hyperscope unleashed

 

gathering documents is easy

It's relatively easy to find documents on the Internet. Search engines like Google takes care of that. Sure, there are improvements to be made in both the number and freshness of documents spidered as well as with the accuracy of the results. But these things are being worked on.

It's easy to visualize searching the web as someone standing outside the library of congress asking for all the books with, say, the words "George Bush" in them and getting thousands of books thrown at them.

going through it all is hard

The question then becomes, after possible medical treatment if some of the books were hard covers, how to find information inside these thousands of book. Then the issue is how to organize the information and discuss it with others.

the meat grinder, the liberator. With original references

The HyperScope is as web based intermediary. As such it lives on a server and catches URL requests and serves the requested page to the user with some added features.

With this virtual pile of thousands of books, the HyperScope becomes something like a magical wand, making all the pages, and all the sentences and all the words in all the books shake free - float free - and become manipulatable by the user.

The text is no longer bound inside the documents. In a real sense, there are no longer any documents, only user defined views. All the information is equal, it's all a great big soup the user has complete control over. It becomes trivial to list all the sentences containing "George Bush" in a new document. If our mission is, for the sake of this example, to only see what George Bush is quoted as saying around the time of the Iraq war, we can easily remove all those sentences which comes from documents which don't have the word "Iraq" in them. We can just as easily only see the sentences which have both "George Bush" and "Iraq" in them highlighted. But as this is not a 'dead' list, we can also expand and collapse the list to show what came after one sentence in the original document and maybe what preceded it. We can see who has linked to what material. Maybe the user only wants to see what CNN has linked to or mentioned, for example. Should we prefer, this can all be listed chronologically. Or by popularity of which document has the most links to it. Or both. Or by whatever other criteria we can think of.

sharing the joy

The user can also mail a sentence from one of these documents to a friend and a link stays behind to the exact spot the sentence came from (not just the document, but the page and paragraph), making it easy to see the source and the context, if so wished.

If the user builds such a view as described above with only CNN mentions of George Bush quotes from a certain period on a certain subject, it is easy to email the view description to someone; the URL will contain all the references to how the view was generated. It's not a document, it's a recipe for how to build one.

initial hyperscope

I am getting a bit carried away here so for accuracy's sake, I'll list the features of an early HyperScope:
- High resolution linking: You can link to sentences, not just pages.
- View Specifications: You can specify how a page should look, in outline form etc.
- Back-Link Management: What pages are linked to are stored so you can see who links where and what types of links are being used.

The later versions can go almost anywhere, so that is a different story. But the fact that the HyperScope system will be built from day one as an evolvable system, is definitively part of the initial specifications.

infra makes hyper

Basically, the HyperScope is a means to provide deeper and more flexible, hence more powerful, interaction with documents (initially, HTML, later more formats) over the web, built in a flexible manner, both allowing for and encouraging future growth and evolution.

With an infrasctructure of
- the basic means by which documents can be imported into the HyperScope and
- instructions can be issued for their modifications,
- the basic functional initial API's as well as
- the flexible architecture and OpenSource system of code development,
&
- the social infrastructure for testing, contributing and improvement,
we will have an infrastructure approaching the flexibility of what TCP/IP provides for networks, for interaction capability.

We will have a way to plug in commands, and sequence them, with criteria, to be carried out on single documents and on multiple documents all merged into one.

 

 

 

does this not excite you enormously?!