the relationship between context, query and linked data

I’m just trying to work this out

 

I’ve been trying to work things out. one of the things I’ve been trying to work out is the relationship between context, query and linked data. I’m too lazy to need to work this out as an academic exercise, it’s in reference to a real thing I needed to figure out for a real experience design challenge and a real person paying me to work things out. so it’s professional working things out as far as I’m professional at anything but since I was being paid to think it was appropriate to at least try and work it out. but of course being paid to work things out is just a catalyst for working things out for yourself. that point in time where you’ve transitioned from a principal designer realising you should have probably thought of something by now to just a human with a brain in a room making sense of things through the application of everything you have known do know and potentially will know through the lens of what’s possible via the channel of what’s achievable within the constraints of what’s viable and with the mighty pen of articulation lofted like excalibur above the white field of parchment upon which the most grand of proclamations will surely be wrote that as such will usher a period of enlightment that in years to come will be held in reverance as the epoch that we now breathe of softly and romantically as that time I tried to work something out and drew a box and then got really tired and made myself a cup of tea.

 

the thing to work out was based on a principal that an actor may determine and navigate their own flow through a system and that the system creates pathways to support free wandering just always one step ahead, signposting just enough desire path to enable discovery without direction but, like, you have to end up buying something of course. imagine a funnel with an infinte in and a tiny out, like the angle of funnel is like 0º or something but you incrementally adjust the angle of intent, the trajectory of flow, the acquisition of yes, at each moment of magic along the path. in the end, the flow through the system is determined by the human actor, but system has created the most desired path of all possible paths and omg fancy that you ended up at a destination that just happened to be a little bit like the place we might have wanted you to to end up in the first place. it’s magic. in the I know what happens at the end but I’m going to make you feel like it’s an entirely free choice magic. but you know, we’re all happy.

 

but this magic requires a system of things that do not exist and are not arranged. it does not require the things that might exist already, like, well, pages. or maps. it requires the design and definition of things that do not exist or are not known because, if this vision is to realised in it’s truest form, they can only be known at the point in time and in the context they’re required where the intent for them has been described. if we are to avoid prescription but support free roam, we have to create the universe where the arrangement of things and the relationships between them can be determined in the moment. a completely transient information architecture that only provides meaning at the point of asking. magic.

 

not going to happen. but there might be a way to work with the known things and the objects and attributes that exist to create a kind of partially free roaming experience. a bit like being let loose in a field that’s actually got an electrified wireframe all the way around it and you can’t help noticing the paths that have already been taken but because it’s all a bit peripheral you just focus on the horizon and make some kind of decisions or other because after all you’re in the field in the first place because somebody told you that in this field you might find the holy grail under a dead cat and so you’re already kind of looking for it. because you fancy a holy grail. not sure why you want one, but whatever, you’re here now.

 

the only way this might work is if you have all that data you have described in way that all the other data you have kind of knows what that data is and what it might be useful for. your data needs be defined in a way that if you ask it what kind of data it is at least it knows the attributes of itself such that it can tell you something about itself. and that something has to be defined in a way that all known data recognises that a. it is data and b. it has attributes. you have to architect the data. but as we know, architecting anything is to define it in terms of the interactions with the architected and so to be truly agnostic of meaning the data needs to be arranged in a way that it becomes information, that is it only exists as objects that become meaningful when the relationships between themselves and other objects are defined. it’s the links between the data that turn data into information. loosely connected as you like, but connected, as creating meaning in the linking of data is where the dna-like helixes of experience begin to spiral and conjoin, creating soups of existence where breed the primordial life-forms of meaning that ultimately evolve and slither out of the soup like the earliest complex bodies that actually look a bit like worms but eventually turn into humans and duh they sit in the dark with white wine trying to work out the meaning of context, query and linked data although maybe all we’re talking about here is the linking of two bits of data that describe the lowest common denominator of the pricing model of a financial services product but when you define a relationship between those two bits of data you can derive a meaning that enables you to at least consider the concept of a more meaningful construct that somehow enables someone to make sense of the data as information in order to derive their own meaning and consider a course of action although even as I’m writing this I’m still on the worms thing and wondering if there was something more in that but in the end there is data and that data has attributes and if those attributes enable us to create relationships we’re onto something even though even I’m not sure what that is and a few minutes ago I had it all worked out in my head but got stuck on worms.

 

but the thing that matters is that the data only becomes information when you ask it to arrange itself. and the way you ask it to arrange itself is by compiling a query that determines the data that is to be arranged and a context within which the arrangement makes sense. and these things don’t come out of the soup. they come out of a brain. they’re modelled and defined in relation to outcomes which is to say even though our aspiration is to build an open environment within which outcomes are determined by the actors within that environment we probably can’t help leaving trails of crumbs around to ensure the actors don’t fall of the stage so really we end up defing the initial context and query so that the actors are even on the stage in the first place.

 

so the definition of context and query are what gives data meaning through requiring the data to link itself in relation to the query such that it becomes information that in the current context is a response to an action triggered by an intent that was to fetch the next set of data based on the query in the context within which the action was triggered. I think. not really sure. I’m just trying to work it out.

 

I’ll come back to it.