Hypermedia

Information linked to other information, so a body of knowledge is navigated by following connections rather than read in sequence. The Web is what made it universal.

Why it matters to me

Hypermedia is the half of the Web I fell for. Studying distributed systems led me to the Web and its history, and what fascinated me there was that bringing networking and hypermedia together tied all the world's information systems into something you could browse seamlessly from a single browser. The Web of Things is those same principles pushed past documents onto devices, which is the research line I ended up working in.

It came back as architecture rather than fascination in context-use. The knowledge base is a durable hypermedia representation of my life and work: entity pages connected by links inside the sentence that explains the relationship, rather than typed edges or trailing "related" lists. The published side is meant to be browsed rather than read from start to finish, driven by the links — the reason it is not a feed, whose linear structure I find too poor to express a person.

I claim that well-maintained hypermedia does more for retrieval than the best retrieval pipeline, so the problem worth solving is maintenance rather than retrieval, and the work belongs at write time rather than at read time (i.e. retrieval). Still working on it as part of context-use.