The imperfection of plain text as a carrier of information

Speech as we know it is absolutely necessary; moreover, it seems to be the best means of information exchange between people at this stage of development. Better than it can only be a telepathic exchange of thoughts that we do not yet own (although some say that they no longer possess it). However, with the development of IT, the advent of computers and the Internet, we have much greater opportunities to organize our communication. But we still continue to use the good old text (like me now), or speech (skype). Nothing new appeared fundamentally, and if it did, it is used in some separate organizations and isolated groups of people, but the broad masses for some reason do it in the old manner. This is problem number one.

The second problem I want to talk about is the problem of preserving, organizing and conveniently accessing the information received on the Internet. I do not know how you personally, habrovchane, but I spend a lot of time on the Internet, hours every day. I discover where intentionally, where by chance a huge amount of useful and potentially useful information for me. And if in the first case I take a number of steps to save this information, then in the second I am often just too lazy to do this activity and I have to hope that the brain will save this information. At my disposal there is a program of hierarchical information preservation (in fact, there are dozens of them, but I preferred one free) - CherryTree . In this program I build trees, for example: software-> OS-> Linux-> useful_commands and in the leaf of this tree I copy what I am interested in with copy-paste. However, this is for text, but the usual links are simply thrown into Firefox’s bookmarks. Before moving to Linux, under Windows, I also used CyberArticle, a paid program for saving parts of web pages (with pictures and other things).
This approach is inconvenient (searching for information among several programs is slower than in one), is not flexible, is not optimal and is not particularly effective, but I have not found the best. And it was this impasse that led me to these fabrications presented above and below.

I thought, in fact, from familiar methods for conveniently storing and organizing information, I can only mention tables and hierarchical structures. I note that by “information” I understand: text (1..N characters, with support for markup when displayed) or links to any files somewhere on the disk. For me it is important that statistical information is automatically saved: from where and when this or that “copy-paste” / picture was taken, who its author is, in what context it was originally present and so on. Unfortunately, none of the programs I found fully functions in the required volume. From this point on, the image of the program that would fill this niche begins to emerge: hierarchical structure, convenient saving of parts of web pages, support for organizing and organizing (tree hierarchy + tags, I can’t think of anything better yet), automatic saving of statistical information, convenient “smart” " Search.
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It was these thoughts that I had until the realization of the existence of the first problem (I remind you that we just talked about the second). The first problem is the imperfection of the text as a means of exchanging information between people on the Internet . Namely: each of us, studying some kind of subject area, some knowledge in a special way puts the information in his head. I know little about the work of the brain, but from what I imagine about it: each new conscious object / fact is trying to connect the brain with what it already knows. It is impossible to fit in something absolutely new right here without communication with the rest. Communication should be. Surely the brain breaks an object into its main components: form, color (information from the eyes), sound emitted by the object (information from the ears), smell, texture, temperature, etc. from the senses. Each of these signs fits into the corresponding area of ​​the brain, there are connections between them, indicating that it is a single object, an additional link to a place in memory is thrown, which allows you to understand exactly when we met with it, and each of the signs is attached to to the previously existing signs of other objects, so that we can easily name all the objects of red color known to us, or cold because of temperature, since coming in acc. the area of ​​the brain ("red" or "cold to the touch") on the links from there quickly find everything you need.

Why not implement the same approach in the program for storing information? The simplest version of such a network is two-dimensional, in a plane, and links and elements of the same type have already been implemented in programs like the mind map . But such softwares are designed more to cover simple diagrams for easy study of any area and easier memorization. I want to adapt them for the full storage of many megabytes of various textual information, which, of course, imposes certain requirements on the implementation of such programs.

However, I see another potential advantage with this approach. Imagine that one person owns a subject area, for example, he is well versed in Linux / * BSD or has mastered Adobe Premiere and is able to edit videos (for simplicity, I only touch computer-related topics). Now this person, if he wants to share knowledge, writes articles, lessons, examples, manuals on the forum / blog. And it is good that he writes. But the problem is that the writing of the text requires a certain mental cost and effort from the person. Expressing one's thoughts in textual form is given to everyone in different ways and for some it is a long and painful process. Also, there is the problem of the lack of standards for the placement of such information, and there’s really much that ... In addition to everything, not everyone is bothered by the pleasant and convenient design of the site and you can find anything on the Internet (yes, now less often than before) ...
In a word: continuous problems for those who want to share information, and for those who want to perceive it. I am rather curious and in my own time I was interested in many topics, from capturing video from an analog camera and video editing to programming, so that with all this sign is not hearsay.
Obviously, it is the good old exchange of information through the text that becomes the bottleneck of modern information exchange.

And now imagine the situation with the use of the program for the above approach to the organization of information. A person who knows the subject area (let's call it the author) already initially, for his beloved, organizes his data in the form of this ... network (the “neural network” asks for the language, but this name is already taken by the class of artificial intelligence algorithms ) and uses it independently happily ever after. But if the moment comes when he wants to share knowledge ( you share your knowledge ... and it will come back to you more than once ), he does not give birth in torment to the site with guides, he simply opens up access to his network (or rather to its part) and anyone who wants to get this information (let's call it the subscriber) simply downloads this branch to itself and integrates into its network with the subsequent synchronization and updating of changing nodes and connections. Of course, all this is as simple and transparent for the user as possible, no more difficult than using a modern social network.

Problems are solved:

• The most important thing is that the subscriber gains access not to a certain part of the information presented in a text form, which is never 100% reflecting the original amount of the author’s knowledge: since the author cannot look at his own guidance through the eyes of a person who is not familiar with the subject area, he simply does not know that he did not accidentally finish something important and did not explain. We can give an example of painting the fence with a second layer of paint: being a dyer it is difficult to understand whether you painted the same place again or not. The subscriber gets access to the author's network and this is practically the same for him as to get access to the author's brain ! It forms requests to this network and extracts slices of information in any form of interest. If he needs to do something quickly, he asks for the shortest step-by-step guide, the minimum set of actions that must be performed to achieve the desired result. If he wants to understand more - requests everything in all details and in a convenient form for himself.
• The subscriber receives the information presented in the form that depends only on the settings of his program. Color, font, background - he sets everything himself and as a result, any knowledge from any sources looks the same and familiar.
• Information has 100% relevance (except for a few seconds to synchronize). All these authors “free myself on the weekend and posting information on the site” are a thing of the past.
• It is easy and intuitive for the subscriber to edit and supplement the information received (as the matter essentially takes place in his own network ), and, in turn, to become the author himself for others
• You can solve the problem of the language barrier! Indeed, translating individual network nodes (which are atomic words or phrases) is much easier than parsing a “full” text with a computer. Also, when translating to improve its quality, you can analyze the links between network elements.

Thus, both problems stated at the beginning of this treatise are resolved. I already see the Internet, in which such networks are common among ordinary people as well as social networks are now popular. Good or bad, but mostly sites with guides on this or that topic will go into the past, sites are unique, but intricate, original, which you won’t understand right away. Forums will go away (administrators often impose on the forum engines not only the functions of communication between people - for which the forums were created - but also collections of guides, compilations to the beginner incomprehensible, spread over sections, filled with topics with “READ BEFORE POSTING!” with the only messages. Negative admins, moderators and just old-timers who gobble up newbies who haven’t sorted out the intricacies of historically layered ones duplicating each other and contradicting one another will disappear into the past. in the topics, comments, ratings and other things ...)

Probably such sites are externally free from clutter of manuals and instructions, they will disappear from the eyes, dissolve into networks . The site of the near future will be completely completely filled only with people talking to each other, an analogue of modern forums or blogs. At the top of each site, as the RSS icon is now recognizable, there will be a “network” sign. Each user, as now stands a link to ICQ or social. the network will link to your network ...

From the point of view of implementation, the following features and points are presented:

• Problem: synchronization of nodes when connecting two networks (or their parts). Ideally, it is assumed that the node “computer” of one person will correspond to the node “computer” of another person and simply merge with it into a single whole. However, this word can be written in another language, it can be written with an error, written in slang or an abbreviation.
  It is probably worthwhile to introduce a certain similarity ratio, expressed as a percentage, and merge nodes when a certain percentage is reached (70% -80%?). However, this does not save from completely different spelling words.
  Output 1: recognize the real meaning of the word. But this long-standing problem and it is worthy of a separate article.
  Output 2: to do something similar to how it is / in my philistine representation / implemented in the human brain. Namely, for each word, for each node, enter a list of clarifying nodes with which it will be associated. When a person hears the word "computer" in his head the definitions of "metal case" "glowing screen", "gray color", "quickly works", "expensive, infection", in general, someone like. Ideally, each concept will correspond to the entire possible number of associations (which will be requested from a single database, see below), users owning some of them will be recognized by the program (as a subset of the set of associations) and their nodes will be mutually integrated.
  In one plane to place them all will not work, so you have to enter some ... layers or echelons. The “visual” layer, the “auditory” layer, the “kinetic”, “olfactory” layer ..., in general, correspond to the main human senses. However, first and here, the problem of describing synonyms of the same concept by different people is not solved, and secondly, to force people to introduce all this is too cruel. People will not use such a program. The advantage of this program, for which it will be loved, should be the convenience and very quick addition and editing of nodes. So the search and adding of the specifying nodes will still be on the conscience of the computer. Probably at first, until full-fledged text recognition tools are invented, you will have to build a network of servers to which users' users will connect and query the words that are allowed to be entered. Something like a modern-day Google “maybe you meant a computer, not a computer?”
  
• Obviously, the program must provide different access to information. For example, to be multidimensional, if we consider some subject area (part of the network) from the point of view of a multidimensional cube (extracting information from it are, respectively, cuts). From the point of view of the network, different types can be both nodes and the links between them (fraternity, submission and humiliation , generation, ...).
• What and how much to share. Quotes, “copy-paste” and whole literary works, which are not yet fully analyzed, are supposed to be stored in whole text. It can be like storing pictures or binary files separately in the file system, and only references to them in the database. Anything else that can be broken, a variety of knowledge that is compact enough to be analyzed by the computing system at a finite time is necessary to break and save.
• It is not clear what requirements will be placed on computer resources for the operation of this program. Even if there is enough processor and RAM, the base in theory can grow on a hard disk for many tens and hundreds of megabytes, which will make it difficult for users to backup. By the way about backups. I immediately take it for an axiom that the issue of storing information in the database of each individual user is very important and should be considered separately. People have big problems even just losing access to their native ICQ or e-mail with a ton of contacts recruited over the years, and what if as a result of a hard drive failure they lose the entire database in one moment, which stores all their received “via computer "Knowledge, its history, correspondence logs, which are dear to people as a memory, and everything else valuable? ..
  But a radical solution seems to be the initial construction of this program on the basis of clouds (and this will be their dawn, finally, their start will be removed from a slip!). Moreover, this solution will radically save the memory of hard disks, if we exclude multiple repetitions of the same nodes and combine the networks of all users into one large network , remembering for each node and for each connection to whom they belong.
• The interface should be visual and intuitive (graphical, three-dimensional, changing as query parameters change), but at the same time, if necessary, provide all the wealth of settings for saving, editing and searching for information.

In general, these are only the main points that I described in order to try to evoke the same image in you that arose in me. Please imagine it, think it over, evaluate the possibility of implementing such an idea and its prospects from your subjective point of view.