About

Representation of “real life” objects and direct object manipulation were fundamental ideas during early days of personal computers. Unfortunately, over the years these ideas have been forgotten in the mainstream of computing. Not entirely, of course. We have GUI, object oriented programming.

But most of “things” that are important for our activities are not directly/explicitly represented in our computers. We do not have ability quickly to create and use representations of things that are important for us: people, events, places … Representations of many “things” are hidden in specialized data stores and can be used only by specific applications. A lot of “things” have shallow representations as text fragments. We cannot do a lot with this kind of representations.

This is the main topic of the “Subject-centric” blog: how to make important “things” explicitly representable in our computer systems and what we can expect if we follow this route.