April 2000
Maps, Space, and Other Metaphors for Metadata
Part 3 of a 4-part of an ongoing series on Blocks technology.
...what does mapping the Internet mean? A few people bought the proposition that you started with a critical mass of information from network topology and used this as a bootstrap mechanism, but not everybody was convinced. What became clear was that the map was the wrong metaphor. And, because the map was the wrong metaphor, we were solving the wrong problem. A map of a network topology assumes there is something to map. And, everybody is going to want to map something different. The map assumes a space to be mapped. Space is the proper metaphor and the map is one possible visualization of that space. Our first architectural principle thus became the late binding of the collection of the data to the means of visualizing that information.
[This project is no longer available online]
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