[ESIP-all] ESIP Visioneers telecon on Monday

[Bruce Barkstrom]

Great Idea.  Most of the time, when we humans want to understand things
we tell stories.  You might even want to go dig out some references on
hypertext narrative theory.  The subject sometimes showed up in Barnes and
Noble
under literary criticism.  See "Hamlet on the Holodeck" and such.
A natural community for this is the SIGWEB group of the ACM.
I'm still a member (although not terribly active).  Interesting meetings,
This approach might also allow you to build narratives that use the dialect
of a
particular community, so that searching or using linked data is stated
in terms that people in that community would use.  As a subtext from
my point of view, this would mean that you wouldn't try to develop a
"universal and interoperable" language, you'd need to think about how
to translate terms between communities.  You might find Umberto
Eco's book "Kant and the Platypus" interesting as a kind of adult
guide (with disconnected essays) to language and how we move
from perceptions to categories.  I'm pretty well convinced that we
need to stop trying to provide "definiitive" verbal categories and move
to empirical classification strategies (motto that goes with this is
STOP WORD SMITHING - FIGURE OUT WHAT'S IN THE REAL
WORLD - but there are some papers that would need to go with this).
An example of the difficulty is trying to translate from the experience
of a biological community (dealing with naming unique specimens)
to the experience of a climate modeling community (dealing with continuous
fields).

One way to build stories is to think of a "tribal" experience - or a visit
to
a strange "tribe" in a particular environment.  To prime the pump, you
could start with a list of characters - then visualize them and give them
personalities.  Next (or maybe first), build a storyboard that might lay
out how some plot themes would work out.  Maybe some of the stories
would be like a hypertext version of the old text game "Adventure".  If
so, would your story have knife throwing dwarves or pirates that would
steal some of your loot?  Maybe for climate you could let people play
like they were up against billionaires who want to steal an election where
a piece
of climate legislation is critical.  You could throw in various natural
disasters (drought, hurricanes, the collapse of the Greenland Ice Cap
and the flooding of Disneyworld in Orlando, etc.).  If you wanted to get
really fancy, you could try making it a multi-player game and let people
join tribes (climate modelers versus villainous climate deniers).
Simcity and related games might also be interesting starting points.
This approach would also fit with work on running scenarios that let
participants try to design policies that "minimize regret" [another
technical term in the dialect of the community of scenario builders].
Rand Corp. had an article on this approach in Scientific American
a number of years ago.  It might also fall under the general category
of "serious games".

If you wanted to get really fancy, you could even create agents with
personalities and turn them loose with concurrent, decision-making.
You'd need to think about using UML and multi-threaded architctures
(grid or cloud computing fit with this naturally).  The swim-lane
synchronization diagrams in UML can help design "conversations"
between agents (or between agents and people).

In short, sounds like fun.  Always the best starting point for research.
Life's too short to be filled with just drudge work.

Bruce B.

On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 8:02 AM, Pat Cappelaere <pat at cappelaere.com> wrote:

> Bruce,
>
> Here is a theme that I have been working on as part of my role as chair of
> the OGC REST Standards Working Group, and development of the NASA SensorWeb
> thanks to support of NASA ESTO:
>
> Story Telling - An Activity-oriented architecture based on REST to bridge
> linked data to our end-users using action links and activity streams to
> enable the sharing of stories around data (and encourage user participation
> in those activities)
>
> Let me know if this may interest the group.
> Thanks,
> Pat.
>
> On Sep 21, 2012, at 5:04 PM, Bruce Caron <bruce at tnms.org> wrote:
>
> As Erin said earlier this week:
> We are currently working on a theme in the Visioneers group. Since the
> draft Climate Assessment will most likely be out, some of the suggested
> themes are around using data and technology to support grand challenges
> like climate. Ideas are on the wiki<http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Winter_2013_Meeting>,
> feel free to edit/add. The next Visioneers call<http://wiki.esipfed.org/index.php/Visioneers>
>  is Monday, Sept. 24, 1 EDT.
>
> A part of the conversation from the last call was a theme that could speak
> to more "actionable" data resources (e.g., "earth intelligence") around
> climate. This would also embrace visualizations that are more than data
> pictures.
>
> Love to have all your ideas on Monday, Sept. 24, 1 EDT.
>
> talk with you soon
>
> bruce caron
> visioneers working group chair.
>
> --
> Bruce Caron, PhD
> New Media Studio
> 417 Samarkand Drive
> Santa Barbara, CA 93105
> (805)966 1100
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