My first experience with the Internet was in 1989 while on active duty in the Air Force. The term “Internet” was not even in the parlance of casual cocktail party chatter.   Moreover, the means by which one navigated the Internet predated the Web browser and was strictly an exercise of typing text statements following an unforgiving syntax that made the Internet a dry and uninspiring experience – but not for long.

In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee, working with Robert Cailliau at the Swiss Research Laboratory, CERN, proposed a distributed information system, based on “hypertext”, a way of linking related pieces of information stored on computers. This concept was named “World Wide Web” and was further enhanced with the first browser, “Mosaic”, in 1993 by Marc Andreesen of The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois (later co-founded Netscape).  The essential design of Mosaic was structured after our “book” paradigm, i.e. you read a page at a time.

Since that time the Web has proliferated with over 93 million hosts as of July of 2000 according to the Hobbe’s Internet Timeline by Robert Zakon of the Internet Society.  The growth is continuing unabated and the process and method of navigating the web has simply not supported the plethora of web pages that spring up each day.  For that matter, the concept of the web browser in its form adapted by Netscape and Internet Explorer, to name just two, may be inadequate for the way we as humans naturally process information.  The University of West Florida’s Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) is taking the traditional web browser paradigm to task and conducting research on a fundamentally more natural way of navigating through the web – it is employing “concept mapping”.  

Concept maps graphically illustrate relationships between ideas. In a concept map, two or more concepts are linked by words that describe their relationship. For example, "free fall is due to gravity" could be described with a concept map containing two ideas, free fall and gravity, and three linking words, "is due to." Concept maps organize information, indeed knowledge, in a manner that more accurately reflects how human beings think. They help one learn new information by integrating each new idea into their existing body of knowledge.

Alberto Canas, Associate Director of IHMC is leading an effort to adapt concept mapping to a pageless web browser.  The institutes’ director, Dr. Ken Ford, explains, “If you can do something about helping humans better exploit the sort of ghetto on the Web, you’ve got lots of customers.  They all know that their browsers no good because when you ask them which button they click the most they all say the back arrow.”

That statement suggests that the metaphor of “surfing the web” coined by Jean Armour Polly in 1992 is not very accurate.  It would appear that it is more akin to driving your car in an unfamiliar area without a roadmap and periodically backing up ever so often.  We do indeed use the “back arrow” often, making us all candidates for “Back Arrow Repetitive Stress Syndrome”.

In an expansive and technically detailed article for the next Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society, Alberto Canas notes, “Why assume that Web pages should be based on Johannes Gutenberg’s book metaphor?  Doing so shackles us with the printed page’s actual size and the printed book’s linear sequence.” 

He later answers his question with, “Its just that we are used to it.”

Visual representations of information are nothing new.  Concept Mapping has been around since the 70’s and there is a growing market for products that 
help adapt information to a visual form.  One company based in Silicon Valley, Mindjet, produces MindManager and EMinds, which allow users to 
create visual representations based on it.  However, standalone products that facilitate adapting static information into visual form is a far cry from 
the complexity in adapting it to the World Wide Web and the millions of sites.

Most of us have readily learned how to adapt to the common web browser interface.  However, there was a time for all of us when it was a new learning 
experience.  The UWF’s Concept Mapping Web interface could very well be another new experience as we move forward with the Internet’s maturation.

The Concept Mapping project is just one of several projects IHMC is pursuing.  Dr. Ford relates the broader context of their work. “Much of the research 
effort at IHMC is focused on what is often called human – centered computing.  This emerging concept of human-centered computing represents a 
significant shift in thinking about intelligent machines, and indeed about information technology in general.  It embodies a ‘systems view’ in which 
human thought and action and technological systems are seen as inextricably linked and equally important aspects of analysis, design, and evaluation.”

The institute’s website, www.coginst.uwf.edu allows downloading of the software for non-profit purposes.

Scott Jackson
Mindlace Media & Photo
Mindlace.com
E-mail
850-217-7994

 Ó 2001 Scott Jackson