Modelling Perspectives to Support Multiple Information Demands

摘要

When viewing the world each of us has a unique perception of his/her surrounding. The way and mode we use to notice important and interesting details is heavily influenced by things like our education, our academic discipline, or our personal interests. The cognitive patterns we prefer, our (working) habits, and in general our focus are often affected by our way to perceive the world. In contexts like multidisciplinary research projects, companies with various diverse departments, or so to say in contexts where many modes of perception and thus many different interest foci shall collaborate, this can be challenging. Different groups need different information to perform their working tasks. Different (data) structures, formats, and namespaces are requested. Even when examining the exact same object different experts will have different perspectives. In this paper we will approach this situation from a data managers point of view. In general these perspectives are no indicator for deficiencies. The different perspectives just mirror the differing tasks and purposes which are addressed. Mostly the existing structures and forms of information (re)presentation are reasonable and adapted to the needs of the people following the perspective. Nevertheless the amount of perspectives is possibly numerous, as potentially each task requires a slightly different way of structuring the available information. Thus it is in the general case infeasible to maintain all possible perspectives as physical data structures. We therefore suggest to systematically describe perspectives and use the information from these models to generate appropriate interfaces on demand.