Situational appropriate data requires a strategy

Computers have become an integral part of modern society. According to Weil, the automation that the computer provides is central to a new economy. The computer as a tool has evolved from a device used strictly for processing data to being used for communication and other network activities such as entertainment in the home. As computers become more complex and pervasive in modern society, humans also become more dependent on the systems and services supporting the computer. The ability to efficiently deal with problems when there is a break in the technical system will be more critical as society heads down this technological path. For instance, the errors and product failures within software often can prevent users from accomplishing their intended goals if the error messages themselves are not actionable, esoteric to the user, or use a vocabulary that is too complicated and outside of the comprehension of the users mental model to be effective.

Published data on the Web

The volume of problems that can occur between user and computer that require product information, take place on such a regular basis that companies such as Microsoft have dedicated resources to the writing and publishing of information to an ever-expanding knowledge base of content. This information can number in the hundreds of thousands of individual articles, providing customers with knowledge about fixes to a problem, patches (downloadable software that correct the problem), and how-to advice (instructional information on software techniques). Differing forms of published data are written constantly to provide users with resolution to their computing issues, building more content to the knowledge base as errors are discovered and solutions are found. However, much of this data is only available by navigating the Internet to the desired content. That is, with a general idea of the cause of the problem, the user could exercise a standard search provided by typical search engines like MSN and Google.

If it were possible to match the problem with the known resolution at the time of the product failure then the computing experience would be much more transparent, visible only to the machine. The complexity required to bring this vision of trouble-free computing is broad and would span both the technology and the information, requiring a coordinated and thoughtful strategy. An effective strategy must encapsulate a number of factors to develop an overall vision of how information technology will all come together as a single unit. This strategy must include the information being produced by the content manager, the publishing mechanism that distributes the data and the services that will consume the data.

If this were possible then the separation between the machine failure and the content expert writing fixes to the problem can also be bridged with a single strategy.

A Visible Future

Luckily, scholars have already described a vision of leveraging help content, and they point to identifying the disparate pieces of technology that bring a seamless computing experience as the next hurdle. William Hart-Davidson makes a case for applying information technology for task-situated contexts in his May 2001 article of Technical Communication. Here he points out that “help is a core function of the information product” (150). And by building on the idea that hypertext can be leveraged to “blur” the distinction between the application layer and help, or what can be referred to as the resolution steps, then information specialist can focus on assisting users by providing a solution in the proper context. Since help content relates to how a user can overcome a problem, a series of steps written to resolve the issue can be viewed as steps to a resolution. Writing in a context sensitive manner requires a skill of technical communicators, according to Hart-Davidson and others. It also requires knowledge of the publishing mechanism unlike those we have had in the past. Looking back on the history of publishing, we find that information is tightly linked to technology as well as how it is used in society. By understanding the publishing system, we may apply it in the future in much more meaningful ways.

Modern day publishing

Reflecting on the history of publishing, the speed and flow of information has been impacted by the technological breakthrough of the day. The degree of the impact on society will vary depending on the source. Scholars will often cite Francis Bacon’s statement that the development of printing changed ‘the appearance and state of the whole world’ with little reference to the impact that technology played. What can be agreed on is that from a general perspective the salient point in the mass distribution of information bourgeoned after the printing press. Although Johannes Gutenburg is most credited with the invention of printing with the letterpress in the early 15th century, printing itself was a well-known technique used in the East. The oldest known printed book is a first century Buddhist text called the Diamond Sutra (Pipes 13). Using etched wooden blocks, printers could cast multiple pages of text and pictures more efficiently than previous generations. Clay type replaced wood as characters could be created out of individual pieces clay and reused for different prints. Since languages in the East used symbols to represent whole words it was possible to characterize these images, consisting of tens of thousands of individual words on small bits of clay, and reuse them to print different variations of printed pages. It wasn’t until much later in Europe when applied to an alphabetic system did the idea of “movable” type become significant. Before this, books in the West were hand scripted into artful manuscripts, laboriously written one book at a time. The division of labor to support the literary public is an interesting distinction in the pre-publishing era. The mass production of books consisted of dictating, reading aloud, of a chief-scribe to under-scribes in what was called a scriptoria.

Arguably, the typographic industry after the printing press transformed medieval workshops to modern plants by the late 15th century during this time period (Eisenstein 35). Industrial printing was ushered in with the advent of the Linotype in 1886 and a year later with Monotype gradually changing to incorporate text with images on a single page by the early 20th century. By this time, information was much more accessible to the public since the cost of publishing and the speed at which information can be produced was quickly condensed from the pre-publishing era. Obviously this is but a generalized viewed of the history of printing, glossing over many of the technological breakthroughs contributing to the paradigmatic shift to the literary culture. Goody and Watt have investigated the implications and consequences of literacy and the social affects of written signs with varying degrees of granularity. What can be called out however, are the change on societal habits in the way that humans consume information and that their uses are directly linked to the limitations on how data is published. The gradual shift from the manuscripts where the written word held significant value because of the specialty resources needed to create a printed text to the printing era and then mass media, where a much more trivial position of information is held, can be contributed to the changing technology.

Habits change to meet with technology

How society uses information is often defined by the technology that provides the information. The printing press opened the door to a larger literate audience with the mass produced book. The history of publishing is viewed as transformative process, shifting societal thinking to coincide with the technical advances. As Elizabeth Eisenstein poses in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, “[t]here are cogent arguments for regarding Gutenburg’s invention as part of a continuously unfolding process; for presenting it (as Febvre and Martin do) as one element in a larger ‘ensemble’ of transformation” (33). The history of publishing points to a longitudinal transformation of practice tempered with a refinement of tools and inventions and a gradual approach to understanding the implications of the technology. Although Eisenstein also points out the ‘ensemble’ shift from script to print the larger context of publishing appears historically broader (33). Why this is important is that cultural behavior and societal activities follow the opportunities that the technology affords. The limitations of the technologies are also the limitations of the audience. Any strategy for the flow of information using a new form of technology must take into account the progressive ‘buy-in’ of society. In present day publications, the audiences have accepted the information in context to the medium. Books and magazines are seen as a different form of publications as much as television is different from radio. A good discussion on the societal impact of printing can be found in “A Short History of Communication” section of Peter Emonds-Banfield’s paper Building the Semantic Web.

New forms of publishing

The mass distribution of information today can take many forms such as television, newspaper, books and the Internet. With varying degrees of information available to the public the most difficult part is filtering through the data to the specific type of content that is interesting to them. This is probably most true for the World Wide Web. Search engines can assist with the problem by returning large list of possible information relevant to their interest, however as users may know this can be a hit-or-miss effort. However, the focus on search technology may not be the only solution to locating the appropriate data needed for a given situation, but rather the attention might need to turn towards the data itself. A central issue to finding the information out of all the possible published content is that the technology of the web is based on the human understanding of text. In other words, the information on the web is meant to be read by humans and technology, as it is used today, is constructed to assist the user narrow down the possible options to the information most relevant to the search terms. If there were some way to know exactly what is needed when it is needed, then the complexity could be reduced (although in most likelihood, taking the processing of information to a different level of difficulty as it evolves). In 1995 Nicholas Negroponte described a new type of bit that he referred to as “headers” – a bit that tells you about other bits (18). In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, the originator of the World Wide Web, builds on his foundation in a framework he entitles the ‘Semantic Web’. This concept of abstracting the information, through headers will be critical in new forms of publishing where information specialist will be needed to construct a clear strategy on how the data will be used by automated systems. In this view machines communicate between machines linking events to data where the knowledge is constantly published and consumed with little human intervention.

The semantic web and services

Again, the main limitation to information published to the web is this; although there is data that can be read by machines little of it can be understood by a machine. The lack of machine-understandable data makes it very difficult to construct automated tools that could leverage all the information published by knowledge experts. However, there are solutions to the lack of machine-understandable data with concept of metadata or what Negroponte referred to as headers. In short, Ora Lassila and Ralph Swick define metadata for the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium, which is the standards body for the World Wide Web) as data about data. The idea of describing information is not a new one, information specialist such as librarians have been describing data with library catalogs for some time. But the concept can go a very long way in complex environments like the World Wide Web. For instance, by using metadata to describe the information contained in a digital element an automated tool can simply link to the appropriate resource because the ‘existence’ of that digital element has been self-describe on how it can be used. The concept of existence is qualified in the metadata through the idea of ontologies. Borrowed from philosophy, the idea of ontologies in computing terms is a “document or file that formally defines the relations among terms. The most typical kind of ontology for the Web has a taxonomy and a set of inference rules” (Berners-Lee). In future forms of publishing, self described data will not only define what it is but also reference a set of rules that defines its vocabulary. So when information is needed it isn’t necessary to know anything about the data (trusting the data is another topic but accounted for in the Semantic Web) since the data element will bring with it all the supplemental information needed to act on that element.

Leveraging the new publishing model

A series of documents in a knowledge base containing software fixes or instructional steps on how to use an application could be published to the web with each document self-described for the context and use of that content. A computer user, without their knowledge, encounters a software problem issuing an error to a service on the Web about the product failure. The Web service directs the user’s application to the knowledge base where a document has been written specifically for the error. Since the document has been self-described, the application on the user’s machine will know how to act on the information contained in the document. In this case, steps in downloading a software fix would automatically occur transparent to the user. The trouble-free computing experience of the user is handled by a self-healing service written between the Web service, the user’s application, and the document (see fig. 1).

A number of underlying standards are developing to support the Semantic Web bringing the vision of knowledge representation closer to practice. The strengths of ontologies are their relative independence, in that the semantics of the resource defines itself through the use of the Resource Definition Framework (RDF) and Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML is a “simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing….” (Extensible). Where XML provides the language for constructing arbitrary categories to markup a digital element for the web, RDF gives the rules for expressing the data. “RDF provides a simple data model for expressing statements using (subject, predicate, value) triples, and an associated serialization syntax in XML. The subject and value of the triple can be defined within the current document or refer to another resource on the Web. The predicate can be any (namespace qualified) XML name. To make statements about a collection of resources, RDF specifies a simple container model, modeling sequences (ordered), bags (unordered) and lists of alternatives. RDF also supports reification, that is, statements about other RDF statements” (Van Ossenbruggen). Together this and other initiatives like RSS 1.0 (RDF Site Summary), which provide the infrastructure for syndicated content to merge with other content, are forging the way for the Semantic Web and web services to be used in practical applications. “In short, RSS 1.0 is a powerful and extensible way of describing, managing and making available to broad audiences relevant and timely information. It allows this information to be made available in a rich and reusable way, and is also perhaps the most widely deployed RDF application on the web” (W3C). These standards are being defined through the W3C and quickly applied on the Web due to the need for these new publishing standards. Marketing researchers like the Gartner group have called out leveraging new technology to solve the connectivity to existing information in a number of reports. “The Semantic Web is about giving users the ability to manipulate, connect and associate Web resources in new and powerful ways. It's a capability similar to that of the corporate workhorse, the relational database” (Thibodeau 34).

Other initiatives are also filling the gaps to practical use, such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative at http://dublincore.org, which is standardizing the minimum set of ‘elements’ needed to describe an object on the Semantic Web. Software errors as well as the documents made to match the error could benefit by using standardized vocabulary. Research is also being done by folks like Wolfgang May to resolve the issues between the intelligent agents seeking data and legacy data that may exist in the form of corporate knowledge bases. This will assist implementers with expediting a workable solution in a manageable timeframe. As more tools are developed to allow content experts to continue with existing processes for building and publishing, the number of available content for the Semantic Web will start to escalate.

Conclusion

Publishing data in a new model where the content is closely linked to an event is a much more complex proposition to envision than what information specialist have had to deal with in previous centuries. The technologies used today as it is applied to publishing and distribution of the information has become more integrated with the construction of the data itself. This gives more focus on the process of writing and gives knowledge transfer a different perspective than what has been taken in the past. In fact, in some ways this view may appear to be taking a document-centered approach by placing the data at the center of the problem space; however that is not the intention (Wick 516). As stated earlier, a clear strategy must be produced that must take the technology and the information into account to work effectively. The need for a clear strategy for publishing data is more evident in a context-sensitive model since the content would be linked to the situation. This places a considerable load on the information specialist to play a more central role in the overall information strategy. In the same breath, the specialist will need to look at the end-to-end experience of the information as a vital component to contextual computing. By reviewing the past and how technology has defined the limitations of human understanding the strategist will have a more thoughtful perspective to outline future development of information. As scholars have pointed out, in “the differences of print and the era of electrical communication, it is apparent that the printed word allowed for a more varied and less autocratic pool of ideas. Interestingly, the World Wide Web is a technology that seems to blend the two aspects of communication. With even greater ease than during the original printing revolution, a large number of people are able to publish their ideas because the machinery involved is far more attainable than was the older print machinery” (Emonds-Banfield 12). Working on the content within a new publishing model is but one step of many towards Auto-detecting and auto-healing for the trouble free computing experience.

Work Cited

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Hart-Davidson, William. “On Writing, Technical Communication, and Information Technology: The Core Competencies of Technical Communication.” Technical Communication 48.2 (2001): 145-155.

Lassila, Ora, and Ralph Swick. Resource Description Framework (RDF) Model and Syntax Specification. 1999. 1 Jun 2003 .

May, W. “Linking the semantic web with existing sources.” Proceedings. 13th International Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications 2002. (78-82) 2002. Washington D.C.: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Pipes, Alan. Production for graphic designers. 2nd ed. Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1998.

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Weil, Peter, and Marianne Broadbent. Leveraging the New Infrastructure: How Market Leaders Capitalize on Information Technology. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1998.

Wick, Corey. “Knowledge Management and Leadership Opportunities for Technical Communicators.” Technical Communication 47.4 (2000): 515-529.