Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  OWL Exports from a Full Thesaurus (01 Nov 2005) What do you make of "198"? You could assume a number. Computer applications make no reliable assumptions since it could be an integer and decimal but not octal, but it could also be something else, too. Neither you nor the computer could do anything useful with it. What if we added a period so "198" becomes "1.98"? Maybe it represents the value of something such as its price. If we found it embedded with additional information, we would know more. "It cost 1.98." The reader now knows that it is a price, but software applications still are unable to figure it out. There is much the reader still doesn't know. "It cost ¥1.98." "It cost £1.98." "It cost $1.98." There is even more information you would want. Wholesale? Retail? Discounted? Sale price? 1.98 for what? Basic interpretation is something humans do very well, but software applications do not. Now imagine a software application trying to find the nearest gasoline station to your present location that has gas for $1.98 or less. Per gallon? Per liter? Diesel or regular? Such a request is theoretically possible using your location from your car's GPS and a wireless Internet connection, but it is beyond the most sophisticated software applications using Web resources. They cannot do the reasoning based upon the current state of information on the Web. Article URL: http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-05/veneman.html Read 128 more articles from American Society for Information Science sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Search engine 'best bets'          Books about Usability | Information Architecture | Information Visualisation | Technology History This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy