Simian Design

July 21, 2003

Trigg's taxonomy of hyperlinks

The thesis of Randall Trigg, entitled “A Network-Based Approach to Text Handling for the Online Scientific Community”, has just recently been put up online. (it was originally written back in 1983). The chapter I have linked to deals with a very indepth look at the taxonomy of links. What Trigg was looking for was for the link to tell us more, to have link types. A link type that we would know, if we followed it, would give us an idea on what we were to find. A couple of the Normal link types were suggested as: citation, background, refutation, support, methodology, data, example, argument, solution, alternate view, correction, update. Some of the commentary link types were: comment, critics, supportative, problem posing comment, problem posing solved, alternate arguments, dubious data, misinterpreted data.

It seems unlikely that the choice of link type name by the creator would be sufficient to convey the meaning of this new link to future readers. This in turn could lead to misuse of the new link type by later critiquers.

Trigg moved on to Xerox PARC to create NoteCards. The core idea of this concept was to have Normal links and Commentary links. The vocabulary of the link type lets us situatie each link's role clearly. It's quite the neat idea. ( via eastgate )

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Tagged As Big Ideas, HTML, Info Architecture

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Posted at 08:42 AM