Passively Acquiring Information Must End

Abstract

When we read a printed paper, document or book we sometimes come to points that we do not understand or where we feel important information is missing, or plain wrong, as we can show by examining a particularly reliable collection of data. Yet we can just shrug our shoulders, since contacting the source of the information is at least very cumbersome. This has changed surprisingly little even if the information does not come in a printed version, but as a digitized book, a Web-page or a PDF File. Usually, there is no easy way to point out mistakes or missing information or asking for more extensive explanations. It seems that the possibilities provided by digitized information, particularly if it is on the Internet, are not used in most environments.

In this paper we argue that it is strange that the power of networks is not used to allow all kinds of interaction, involving authors, readers and the information at issue, in collections of digital documents, while communication is often considered to be over boarding in some social networks. We discuss one concrete solution for alleviating this problem in collections of digital documents.

Note: This paper is based on [10] and particularly the paper [18], but puts more emphasis on the real reason for NID (as already hinted at in the abstract), and on usability and application aspects. Note that basic ideas of NID were already addressed in [19] .