Ambient Findability

norburym writes "Peter Morville is an information architect, an advocate of expanding the boundaries of librarianship in an Internet age and the voice of ambient findability. In this new book from O'Reilly, Morville expands on a theme he's been discussing for several years: we live in an age where computers and the Internet are changing how we access information. Digital networks are available everywhere. As users, we have computers, PDAs, GPS units, smartphones, software and other network technologies that enable constant and mobile connectivity. As Morville writes, ambient findability is "a realm in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime" and his book is a thought provoking chronicle of the advent of that goal." Read the rest of Mary's review. Ambient Findability author Peter Morville pages 204 publisher O'Reilly Media rating 9 reviewer Mary Norbury-Glaser ISBN 0596007655 summary Information retrieval in an age of ubiquitous computing.

Ambient Findability is divided into seven sections that track the journey from simply defining what the author means by findability through a history of man's search for location awareness in both the physical environment and in the cyber world; how we interact with information through documents, language, and systems of retrieval; intertwingularity and findable objects; the balance between push (advertising) and pull (information retrieval); being a Web designer and a user advocate; metadata and physical data in the context of findability; and the ability to make informed decisions based on open source and emerging technology.

A core definition offered by the author in Chapter 1 is for findability: "the quality of being locatable or navigable; the degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate; the degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval." Morville discusses how well various websites perform in providing information desired by the user and how successful sites cater to mass customization. Businesses and non-profits that aim to reduce search time and improve findability of their site contents will gain marketplace advantage.

Chapter 2 is an interesting and informative introduction to the history of wayfinding through lessons learned from various animal species (exocentric and egocentric navigation, echolocation, etc.) to how humans have adapted landmarks or created tools to aid in navigation and exploration (lighthouses, compasses, sextants, maps, etc.) and further how architects and urban planners can effectively design built environments. The logical extension of this discussion is how the wayfinding techniques developed in the physical world have translated to the digital realm. In this discussion, we see how we have translated our spatial metaphors to the web.

This leads directly to the next chapter, on how people interact with information. Morville tackles the difficult task of defining information and considers the concept of relevance in relationship to the information we seek to retrieve from the Internet and how the inherent ambiguity of language negatively impacts any system of information retrieval. To top this off, the author reminds us that users themselves introduce added complexity and complication to how people seek information. He cites several research studies and literature on the subject and suggests that there is value in integrating both push and pull in how we interact with information systems.

Chapter 4 deals with the topic of intertwingularity (a combination of "intertwined" and "mingled") or the idea that things are connected together in a complex and nonlinear way. In terms of the Internet and ubiquitous computing, this translates into our ability to connect to disparate bits of data not only from computers but also from mobile devices and other ambient devices (GPS, EZPass, pagers, RFIDs) that are truly pervasive throughout society. Morville takes us through part two of wayfinding with descriptions of GPS technology, interactive mapping and photographic confluence sites, tracking using GPS and cellular communication, RFID, webcams, and of course the convergence of technology as wearable computing (sunglasses that can be used with cell phones and MP3 devices, Bluetooth enabled garments, cameras embedded in glasses, etc.) becomes more common and affordable.

Morville then leads us neatly back to the idea of push and pull. In chapter 5, he discusses the necessary flow toward balance and uses the example of Google, which successfully intertwingles unobtrusive targeted ads with search results. Design and marketing, as the author notes, are not enemies. Yet finding the balance is tricky and not a simple task. Morville describes his "user experience honeycomb" model which combines the key issues that designers should consider when creating a website that optimizes findability and therefore enhances user experience: useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible, and valuable. He concludes the chapter with hacks that improve web findability: adopting search engine optimization techniques (avoid drop down menus, image maps, frames, etc.; use RSS feeds with backlinks; embrace web standards; determine and include keywords and phrases in visible body text, links, headers, tags, etc.), and personalization (examples include Yahoo! using individual profiles to customize sports scores and stock information, the Weather Channel using zip codes for local weather, and Google Alerts letting users track keywords in news and web sites).

In chapter 6, "The Sociosemantic Web," Morville outlines the controversy surrounding an article, "The Semantic Web," that appeared in May 2001 in the Scientific American. The authors of the article propose an ambitious "road map for future Web design" that subsequently fueled a debate between W3C Semantic Web members and social software supporters. The debate leads to a discussion about how well metadata can be normalized in an environment such as the Web. Morville uses this debate as an introduction to a history and structural description of metadata. He describes the formulation of taxonomies and the use of controlled vocabularies to enable findability. Of course, web sites are not simply hierarchical; they are complexly grouped which brings us to the idea of folksonomies where users tag objects with one or more keywords that become shared. Folksonomies are obviously not great for findability since they fail at semantic relationships and hierarchy. However, all forms of structure (folksonomies, ontologies, and taxonomies) can co-exist on the Web to describe metadata and the differences between data and metadata are becoming less distinct. Amazon is a perfect example of this: traditional publication and topic details and concordance are documented along with customer reviews and rankings. Amazon also has the option to "search inside this book" which makes the pages and even the text itself become metadata.

The final chapter of the book delves into how we are ultimately capable of making informed decisions through the power of the Internet: the sheer volume and variety of sources available to us and the ease of access enable us to take charge of decisions we would normally trust to those professionals outside of our narrow realm of expertise. We decide which information to believe in. Morville considers information literacy and digital librarianship and proffers the idea that libraries and the Internet have common principles of maintaining free expression, privacy, free and equal access, and intellectual freedom.

Tim O'Reilly is well known for expanding the boundaries of technology in print and through conferences like the Emerging Technology Conference, the Web 2.0 Conference, and the Open Source Convention held in both the US and in Europe. His agenda has never been to fill convention halls with attendees who fit a lowest common denominator; his aim has been to bring together people who not only think smart but who also have the ability to think outside the normal boundaries of their particular field of interest (Robert J. Lang, Freeman Dyson, James Gosling, among others) and who therefore inspire innovation. With the publication of Ambient Findability, O'Reilly Media continues this tradition of giving readers an opportunity to experience the visionary writing of people like Peter Morville.

Read Ambient Findability if: you are interested in expanding your business or nonprofit through its presence on the Internet; you are a librarian and want to grow into the nontraditional environment of the Web; you are a Web designer and want to optimize the findability of your sites on the Internet; you are a user and want to enhance your searching experience. Read this book if you are a teacher, a student, a writer, a parent...in short, if you use a computer or a handheld or a GPS or a smartphone or any type of technology that connects you to the world, then you should read this book. Peter Morville's Ambient Findability will amaze and delight you. It will give you new insight into how ubiquitous computing is affecting how we find and use information and how we, as users, can and will shape the future of how data is stored and retrieved.

Mary Norbury-Glaser is IT Director at the Barbara Davis Center, an affiliate center at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver."

You can purchase Ambient Findability from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Which market is most important to us?

[dada21]

This book and the review uses way too many catch phrases: findability, intertwingularity, Folksonomies, metadata, smartphone, backlinks. Talk about overload.

Nonetheless, as the Internet becomes more available in even the lives of the poorest (in the US at least), will the need for libraries and physical stores of information even be needed? I've been "connected" wirelessly to the web now for over 3 years, and last month I upgraded my wireless connection to T-Mobile's EDGE network (150kbps downloads practically everywhere I go).

With Google's ability to aggregate not just information but opinions, reviews and similar items/services into one easy-to-access page, there are many services we won't really need around. This weekend I saw the demo of the GPS+XM traffic-nav solution in helping me avoid traffic jams ahead and find quicker ways for me to get to my destination. WIth that device I won't need news radio at all (I already receive weather updates to my wireless PDA). A few weeks ago I met with a company that is working on RFID check-out lanes for a grocery store (fill up your cart, walk out) and it seems that they're less than 6 months away from being "ready" -- they're just waiting for manufacturers to include the RFID tags needed to get the system working.

I'm ordering this book -- I had thought about writing something similar a few years ago. In one of my jobs as an IT consultant, I find myself providing more services regarding these new technologies, especially to CEOs and top level managers. It is an easy sell especially when you look at the time saved for people making the top tier incomes. The great part about the movement for cheaper goods is that we see all these products trickle down to even the lower class worker.

The last few paragraphs of the review are enlightening: TIm O'Reilly doesn't try to fill convention halls with the lowest common denominator. This is intriguing to me because I've always had a difficulty in figuring out which market I should attack the hardest: The rare (and wealthy) CEO wannabe-geek who wants to have all the toys first, even if it doesn't help him become more productive? The common CEO who sees that technology can help him become more productive, but he can't pay as much as the guy with the desire to have everything the earliest? The common user, who will eventually come to use technology when it is either forced on them, or when they finally get around to see the value that the technology brings to every-man? I'm not jealous of O'Reilly's ability to pack conventions with the top level geeks, but it is interesting that he even has a market. How many of his readers actually understand what he's saying though, and how correct has he been in previous years?

Lastly, how many geeks here have an intense amount of new technology knowledge, but find themselves unable to sell that knowledge for an income? Is the super-geek becoming more common, or less common? I find a lot of geeks just out of college aren't truly information whores, they're just ex-jocks with a tiny bit of tech know how.

Re:Which market is most important to us?

[lahi]

Your "Freudian slip" is interesting, because it hints at a far more serious issue. The important question is not how to guarantee easy access to information, we have that, more or less, today. The problem is that with this - precisely expressed - easy information excess, finding the relevant information in time, and keeping the irrelevant information out, becomes harder, not easier.

There are many sub-issues. I'd like to point out just two:

The first issue is that when not all information is digitized, the analog data already in our collective possession will tend to be ignored, and the digital data will be preferred. So a lazy search will show only the digital results, and omit relevant analog results, which would only have been found by harder work.

The second is that while digitally stored information is much easier to copy, it is also much easier to destroy. And a lot of information which would in the past have been rendered in a form that was self-contained and easily transferred physically is now stored in very few copies on harddisks which are volatile. Two examples of this are personal correspondence and photo albums.

The first problem (should it be called "digital boundary"?) can perhaps be postponed by digitizing more, and by digitally published reference works referring the off-line data, although this may actually compound the overall problem in the long run. There is an interesting sf story by Hal Draper(1961): _Ms fnd in a lbry_ on this matter.

The second problem can be "solved" by easier reproduction, distribution and archiving, however that again compounds the overall problem. Also, you may have mixed feelings about having the erotic snapshots you took of your wife last night safely stored at archive.org.

Speaking of which: The wayback machine is attractive, but delusive, as it doesn't really store everything, yet gives the impression that it does. Many websites are dynamic in a way which prevents proper archival. And even if you can archive individual websites, it is exponentially more difficult (=impossible) to archive the relations between websites. I "think" and remember "spatially", and I often would like to be able to go into one of the first libraries I visited, the way it was on the particular day I visited it. If I could do that, I might for instance be able to find a particular sf novel, which I know I have read, but can no longer remember the name of, by picking it from the shelf on which I know I found it.

Ultimately, the externalisation and sharing of human memory is what made civilization what it is today, but it may eventually turn out to also be the doom of civilization.

-Lasse

Animals in color

[plasticsquirrel]

Interestingly, although admittedly a small point, the book seems to be the first O'Reilly animal book to be colored in. I really like the new look, and I hope it continues.

WTF...

[GWSuperfan]

is "Ambient Findablility?"

"Ambient Findability is divided into seven sections that track the journey from simply defining what the author means by findability through a history of man's search for location awareness in both the physical environment and in the cyber world"

Again- "Huh?" So, I have to read the stupid book just to find out generally what it's about? Is it just me, or does that sound retarded?

And while we're at it- let's stop making up meaningless words and phrases. If it's truly a new concept, that's one thing. Otherwise, unless it's in a dictionary, I just wish peoplw would use words and phrases that *are*

All of the People All of the Time

[Quirk]

First, as has been noted, the catchphrases are as ambiently findable, whatever that means.

Second being able to find everything about everything isn't a good thing. Bertrand Russell pointed out that one is better served becoming intimately knowledgeable of a handfull of books on any given subject than to have a passing familiarity with all available material on the subject at hand.To know a subject one has to have a foundation from which to work. The hallmark of a journey workperson is a fundamental understanding of the principles that inform the work.

Ambient Findability seems to me to be yet another guide for the social gadfly, catchphrases abound, and, the ever aspiring social/corporate climber can jump on or off board any bandwagon by instanteously accessing the prevalent catchphrases served up in a pablum formula that allows for quick regurgitation.

The best thing that can be said for such approaches is that they draw off the pop culture adulators and papprazzi, allowing easier navigation for those who know their stuff and where they're going.

serendipity

[rheotaxis]

Good review, I'm going to find this book someday, perhaps. A findable book means a book that can be found, and I can find lots by serendipity, i.e. just random walks through the physical stacks, and picking books off the shelf without looking at the title, author, or call number first. Sometimes, I have visions of which stack and shelf to visit just before I arrive at the library, in which case the randomness can be questioned. No matter what, I always find a book, sometimes one I might never find by more rational methods, sometimes books that later prove very meaningful in some way. What part of the mind is helping me find these books? I recommend everyone try it, let your whole psyche guide you to new found freedom.

The benefits go to free and open societies

[cryfreedomlove]

The benefits of ambient findability will be exploited most successfully by societies who do not attempt to restrict the ability of the average citizens to use the ambient findability. The societies that allow free and open access will improve the lives of all of their citizens at a faster rate than those that do not. A government like the one currently running the show in Iran will continue to have a hard time controlling the hearts and minds of their citizens. Citizens of open societies in Europe and the United States will have to remain vigilant against new ham handed restrictions that are intended to keep us safe.

Overdefining the obvious

[techno-vampire]

A core definition offered by the author in Chapter 1 is for findability: "the quality of being locatable or navigable; the degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate; the degree to which a system or environment supports navigation and retrieval."

Or written clearly, "Findability: how easy or hard it is to locate what you need."

Judging by the review, this book is filled with overqualified obfuscated definitions of simple concepts that have never needed names before and don't now. I doubt I'll ever need to read this blinding glimpse of the obvious.

Re:The Irony

[delong]

The irony here is that while it is becoming easier and easier to find stuff, every year there is less and less stuff worth finding

The irony is that it is becoming harder and harder to get your content found in a sea of content. Electronic academic journals are finding this phenomenon a bit hard to overcome. Content overload is as much a problem for the future as content obscurity was in the past.

Privacy doesn't appear to have been mentioned

[billstewart]

Some kinds of information hiding are important for the information providers, which probably does improve information findability for the user, but it's also important for the users to be able to hide information about themselves, especially when data-mining is becoming increasingly practical, inexpensive, and popular with marketers and governments.

There's some information hiding that can happen by accident, but way too much of it requires explicit thought and planning, and doesn't happen if it's not planned for. For instance, the designs of cookies and HTTP-REFERER interact in ways that make it easy for a central banner-ad service to track your reading across multiple sites, and most kinds of back-linking just increase that effect. But there's no mention of it in the article - does the book address it, or does the book pay more attention to _maximizing_ the ability to do data-mining? That turns out to have been a serious problem with Ted Nelson's Xanadu architecture - if everything is transcluded instead of just copied or one-way-linked to, and you can track between readers and authors to support copyright payments, then it's possible to track who's reading what across the entire network with just a Simple Matter of Programming.

My standard practice with online mapping programs is not to use a precise address, especially for both ends of a trip. Bad enough they've got my IP address, but there's no need for them to have my exact street address, when around the corner or the next town over is usually close enough. My ZIP code is almost always 90210 (though sometimes that's a problem - Apple iTunes keeps telling me about events at the Beverly Hills Apple Store, which isn't helpful :-), my birth year is usually the example year on websites that have one, and there are other things that don't need to know real information about me either.

But it only gets worse as mobile devices start Ambiently Finding things - your cellphone tells you when the next bus is going to arrive, creating a log entry at the bus-finder's service, and as you ride down the street it's checking the temperature of the decaf coffee at every Starbucks you go by (creating log entries, but not necessarily alerting the baristas at Fourth&Brannan that they'll need to brew more before you arrive), inventorying the 50ml Irish Whisky mini-bottles at the liquor store acros the street from Starbucks, creating another log entry, refusing to accept a pushed coupon ad attempt from the Old Navy store the bus goes by. And that's not even counting what happens as RFIDs become widely used - every shoestore you walk by starts telling you your Birkenstocks are due for a retread, but the Homeland Security Terrorism Reduction Data Entry system (aka traffic light controller) decides that you obviously must be a leftist so it takes your photograph with the redlight-camera.

Well, yes and no ...

[jc42]

Perhaps it's just me, but I find the attempts by librarians to stay 'relevant', while understandable, to be just a little bit pathetic.

It's not you; that definitely comes across. But "librarian" isn't a monolithic borg-like population. Some of them have taken to the internet as a great new extension of their traditional role. The city library a mile from where I live has a room full of internet terminals; the "card catalog" has been electronic for 20 years and online for 10 years. And so on.

When's the last time you asked a librarian a question?

Probably not long. The problem here is: On the Internet, nobody can tell you're a librarian.

Actually, I have knowingly communicated with a number of librarians, via email, in the past couple of months. This was as part of several ongoing efforts to turn local archives of paper into electronic forms.

One of these is the Village Music Project, which has a collection of personal notebooks of local working musicians' in the past three centuries or so, converting them to a form that's easily usable (by mostly free, open-source software) by musicians who are interested in that sort of thing. The director of the project has complained about being terminally busy, partly due to such things as an effort to preserve and make available online the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, a similar effort based on Cecil Sharpe's life work.

There are a zillion efforts like this going on right now, and librarians are deeply involved in many of them. This shouldn't be a surprise, since librarian training does include a lot of the techniques needed for such efforts. Only the medium has changed, not the information. And our new medium has the ability to organize stuff in ways that weren't possible before, while not invalidating any of the older organizing techniques.