Why Known Space Is Likely to Happen

A project like Known Space is probably inevitable because we are already making several baby steps toward mapping the web; we're just not doing it in any coordinated way.

• There are many sites that are simply lists of links to all known sites covering a certain topic. Such sites are primitive (text-based) maps and they help to combat the lost-in-webspace feeling.
• Most well-organized websites try to give their visitors some idea of what's there and what's related to what within each site. There is almost always a button on each page in their site that lets the visitor return to the home page where these resources are listed.
• Now that some browsers support frames, many sites are using the capability to give visitors an ongoing display of local context. Those sites always keep a frame containing pointers to major subdivisions of the site on screen at all times no matter where the user jumps within their site. Users can't get lost in such sites. of course, as soon as they step back out onto the web, they're lost again.
• Browers are adding the ability to enclose bookmarks in folders so that users can clump sites they've already visited for themselves. This is a primitive form of mapping. In essence, Known Space is an extension of this idea with the addition of having site clustering happen semi-autonomously and adaptively, and making the map colorful, two-dimensional, and graphic rather than linear and textual.
• Many of today's search engines already provide weak versions of neighborhoods with a ``find similar pages'' button or with a tree-based hierarchical search mechanism. These search engines are moving toward an increasing ``hierarchization'' of their view of webspace. They recognize that simply giving users raw searching power over all known websites is not enough. You must also give them some idea of what's where.
• It's likely that a lot of mapping already exists, however it is the private property of the search engine companies who developed it by extensive search and analysis and who apparently believe that they should keep it secret. (This secrecy may well change within the next six months, and if so this proposal may be irrelevant.) One idea behind Known Space is to give this discovered linkage information directly to the user.

Several users have large numbers of files on various computer accounts. Few, if any, of them leave those files unorganized. Total disorganization is fine if you only have a dozen files or so--you can certainly remember the distinctions among those few files--but almost all users with hundreds of files organize them into categories and subcategories. They can't keep track of everything if it's all laid out as one long list of files. The organization that they impose on their files is a kind of map of where things are, a map small enough to fit within their working memory. Although they could use their computers to find any particular file, simply finding a file among hundreds or thousands gives no context for that file. Usually, when we work on a file we also want to have related files close to hand. We could always jump to any file, but the fact is that most times we don't do so; we usually work within a context.